The San Francisco Board of Supervisors today approved controversial legislation to legalize and regulate short-term housing rentals to tourists, voting 7-4 on the package after supervisors narrowly rejected a series of amendments to rein in an activity that has taken thousands of units off the market for local residents.
Amendments to limit hosted rentals to 90 nights per year, to require that Airbnb pay about $25 million in back transient occupancy taxes it owes the city before the legislation would go into effect, to exclude in-law units from eligibility for short-term rentals, and to limit rentals in single-family home neighborhoods failed on a series of 5-6 votes.
Sups. John Avalos, David Campos, Eric Mar, Norman Yee, and Jane Kim voted as a block on the amendments to limit the scope of short-term rentals facilitated by Airbnb and other companies, as a broad coalition that includes tenant, landlord, labor, neighborhood, and affordable housing groups had sought. Kim parted from that block to vote yes on the final legislation, which the others opposed.
Amendments proposed by Kim to give housing nonprofits the right to file injunctive lawsuits to help enforce the legislation and by Campos to ban short-term rentals in units that have been cleared of tenants by Ellis Act evictions were approved 8-3. But because those changes were substantial, they were turned into trailing legislation that must go back to the Planning Commission.
Despite a series of amendments since Board President David Chiu proposed the legislation over the summer, its basic tenets have changed little. It requires short-term rental hosts to register with the city and rent out only their primary residence, which they must live in for at least 275 days out of the year, with the Planning Department enforcing the regulation on a complaint basis.
That effectively limits the rental of entire homes to 90 days per year, but Chiu, Airbnb, and its hosts strenuously rejected calls to extend that cap to hosted rentals, such as spare bedrooms that might otherwise be available to permanent city residents. Chiu said his legislation was “framed through the lens of our housing affordability crisis,” arguing that many San Franciscans rely on Airbnb income to make their rent.
Avalos said he understands that position, but he said tourists shouldn’t be displacing San Franciscans, proposing the 90-day limit on all short-term rentals. “I think it’s important to maximize our residential housing stock to the utmost,” he said. Mar also voiced strong support for extended the cap, criticizing the “cult-like” beliefs by some home-sharing advocates.
As I’ve been reporting in the Guardian over the last two and a half years, Airbnb and its hosts have been openly defying city laws against short-term rentals, as well as ruling by the Tax Collector’s Office that the city’s transient occupancy tax (aka hotel tax) of about 15 percent applies to short-term rentals.
Airbnb just began to collect that tax for its guests last week, but Campos argued that it should pay those back taxes going back to the city ruling in the spring of 2012 before the city legalizes and validates its activities. Company representatives have said its TOT collection would total about $11 million per year.
“I believe it’s only right that Airbnb make good on its back taxes before this legislation becomes law,” Campos said, arguing this $10 billion company is being rewarded for defying city regulators. “Do we give special treatment to a multi-billion-dollar company?”
But supporters of the legislation were anxious to move it forward, despite the dizzying series of complicated amendments, something Avalos said was unusual. “I’m surprised it was given the green light to leave today,” Avalos told reporters after the vote. “There was a lot of pressure to move it forward.”
Now the question will be whether the Planning Department can effectively enforce the regulations, particularly given that Airbnb has been unwilling to share data that might help in that effort. City officials have seemed powerless to enforce laws against short-term rentals that have been on the books for decades, even with rising public concern about the issue over the last year.
“I’m concerned that the legislation simply isn’t enforceable,” Kim said, arguing for the private right of action component that will be returning for board consideration in the coming months.
The other question is whether we’ve heard the end of an issue that has polarized city residents, or whether the coalition of opponents will succeed in a threatened initiative campaign to put more stringent new short-term rental regulations before voters next year.
Sup. Mark Farrell thanked Chiu for taking on the issue despite the intractable positions on both sides, saying, “I think everyone recognizes this to be a no-win situation.” Wiener are referenced the wide emotional divide on the issue: “The views around it are so intensely divergent.”
“The status quo is not working. This system of home sharing is happening in the shadows with little or no oversight,” Wiener said. “It’s time to bring it out of the shadows.”
Even supporters of the legislation, such as Breed, said they would continue closely monitoring the situation to ensure the legislation helps curbs widespread abuses of lucrative short-term rentals, including landlords evicting rent-controlled tenants to use Airbnb and entrepreneurial tenants renting out multiple apartments through Airbnb, practices Chiu sought to curb.
“The one thing that I think everyone can agree upon is the status quo is not working,” Chiu said early in the hearing.
After the legislation — which comes back to the board for a perfunctory final vote next week and goes into effect in February barring legal challenges — Airbnb’s Public Policy Director David Owen told the Guardian, “It’s a tremendous step forward and we have a lot of work to do.”
The broad and diverse coalition opposing Sup. David Chiu’s legislation to legalize and regulate Airbnb and other short-term housing rental companies — which the Board of Supervisors will consider tomorrow [Tues/7] — have boiled its many concerns down to three particular demands.
The coalition of tenant and landlord groups, affordable housing and neighborhood advocates, hotel workers and homeowners, and asundry other community leaders held another in a series of rallies on the steps of City Hall on Friday, again raising a variety of concerns.
But now, they’re penned a letter that has “three core recommedations.” The first is a call to limit rentals to 90 nights per year. That has been a feature of Chiu’s legislation from the beginning for unhosted rentals, given that it requires hosts to be permanent residents who live in their units at least 275 days per year, but the legislation still allows hosts to rent out a spare bedroom through Airbnb with few limits.
“If this is not done, the current proposal will allow year-round tourist rentals in every residential unit in the City which will drive up housing prices, create further economic incentive to increase evictions, further deplete housing stock for residents, and deteriorate the quality of life in our residential neighborhoods,” the coalition wrote in a letter to Chiu.
The supervisor had been a little cagey about the 90-day limit in the past, but when we pressed him on the issue during his endorsement interview with the Guardian last week, he confirmed that his legislation would allow spare bedrooms to be rented for more than 90 nights per year.
Chiu said his primary concern with the legislation was ensuring entire homes can’t be rented more than 90 nights per year, which he said was the main threat to the city’s rental housing stock, but he was open to amendments that would limit the rental of spare rooms, although that’s a practice he still wants to allow.
“We are grappling with the idea of what that balance is,” he told us.
The coalition is also asking for the legislation to explicitly ban short-term rentals of below-market-rate units and other affordable housing built with public subsidies. The third recommendation seeks to include “expedited private right of action” in the legislation, allowing neighbors and other third parties to file enforcement actions with the courts without waiting for city enforcement processes to slowly play out first.
Members of this coalition will also present individual demands tomorrow, but the coalition also conveyed its opposition to supervisors approving this legislation tomorrow:
“We are unanimous in our position that the process being pursued by Supervisor Chiu is rushed. The City will live with the intended (and unintended) consequences of this legislation for many, many years. We implore you to amend the legislation with the recommendations articulated above, and as necessary postpone the Board hearing on this measure. This is one of the most important housing policy issues the City has faced in a decade, and the ‘solution’ by the Board of Supervisors must be done right and not hurried.”
The legislation will dominate the otherwise sparse agenda for tomorrow’s meeting, which starts at 2pm in City Hall. We’ll be live-tweeting the action, so follow along @sfbg or check back here for the full report.
Board of Supervisors President David Chiu’s reputation for forging decent compromises is being severely tested as his widely criticized legislation to legalize and regulate Airbnb and other short-term housing rental companies now moves to the full board, where its fate is uncertain.
Nobody is happy with this legislation, not even Airbnb and its hosts, whose scofflaw actions in San Francisco would finally be made legal. But because the company has been unwilling to help the city regulate its short-term rentals in order to preserve permanent affordable housing units in the city, the final legislation would be tough to enforce.
That’s why Sup. Jane Kim voted against the legislation yesterday at the board’s Land Use and Economic Development Committee meeting, according to an account by the Examiner, citing the city’s inability to enforce the legislation’s ostensible limit of 90 rental nights per year (it requires hosts to live in their units for 275 days per year).
Nonetheless, the committee voted 2-1 to send the measure on the full board, even though it still has significant organized opposition from both landlord and tenants groups, hotel owners and workers, Airbnb hosts who don’t want to register or pay taxes, and a wide variety of other activists, including those who originally helped forge city laws preventing apartments from being converted into tourist hotels.
Although the San Francisco Tenants Union helped crafted the legislation and was an early supporter, the group has since voiced concerns about many aspects of the legislation, which has grown steadily weaker from a tenant perspective, offering few protections for tenant-hosts and even being amended this month to require that landlords get notified when a tenant registers with the city as a host (making it less likely those hosts will actually register).
At least one of Chiu’s close advisors warned him over a year ago that this was a no-win endeavor for him — particularly as it comes to the board just a month before the end of his Assembly race against board colleague David Campos — and that appears to have been prescient advice.
Yes, someone needed to wade into this muck and mire, given that thousands of apartments in San Francisco have been taken off the market by Airbnb, which has even flouted city rulings that it collect and pay the hotel tax (which the company says it will finally start doing tomorrow [Wed/1]).
But the question facing supervisors next week will be what the city is getting from Airbnb and similar companies in exchange for legalizing their illegal business model, at a time when the city needs every affordable housing unit it can get for actual San Franciscans.
In the wake of this week’s contentious hearing on legislation to legalize and regulate short-term housing rentals in San Francisco, where Airbnb was chastised for snubbing the city on collecting and paying local taxes, the company today sent an email to its hosts announcing that it would begin doing so Oct. 1.
The message tells hosts that it will be collecting and remitting the city’s Transient Occupancy Tax on their behalf and that “hosts will not have to do anything extra.” But as Tax Collector Jose Cisneros told us for our article this week, that isn’t totally true. He said that hosts are still businesses and therefore need a business license, although companies like Airbnb can assume responsibility for the other two tasks involve: obtaining a “certificate of authority” that allows a business to collect taxes and filing monthly tax statements.
“All hosts would have to do is file annual business registrations,” Cisneros told us.
But hey, following local laws and correctly informing their customers about the legality of these transactions has never been Airbnb’s strong suit, so I suppose this is progress. The company’s email follows in its entirety:
Earlier this year, we announced that we would begin collecting occupancy taxes on behalf of hosts and guests in San Francisco. We’ve been working with the City to make the process streamlined and easy to follow, and today we are pleased to share that we are planning to launch this program on October 1. We know our community contributes substantial, positive economic impacts in neighborhoods across San Francisco, and this initiative will continue to make the city even stronger.
We’ve posted more information about this announcement on our Public Policy blog and we hope you’ll check it out. We also wanted to share more details about what this update specifically means for hosts and guests in San Francisco:
For reservations in San Francisco booked on or after October 1, guests will see a new line item on their Airbnb receipt for the city-imposed Transient Occupancy Tax. The tax will be added to the total amount paid by guests on stays of fewer than 30 days – hosts will not have to do anything extra. If you’ve already been collecting the San Francisco Transient Occupancy Tax for Airbnb guests, you should not do so after October 1.
Collection of these taxes won’t affect the payout amounts you receive as a host. Just like before, you’ll continue to receive your accommodation fee minus the Airbnb host service fee. Before paying and on the itemized receipt, your guests will see a separate amount for taxes in the total amount they pay for a reservation. If you’d like to learn more about occupancy taxes and Airbnb, please visit our Help Center.
Additionally, tomorrow our Regional Head of Public Policy David Owen will be hosting a webinar to discuss this important topic, and to give you the opportunity to ask questions. You can sign up to participate here.
San Francisco is our home and we look forward to continuing to work with everyone here to make it an even better place to live, work and visit.
As controversial legislation to legalize and regulate Airbnb and other short-term housing rental services operating in San Francisco headed for another contentious City Hall hearing on Sept. 15, the San Francisco Treasurer & Tax Collector’s Office quietly unveiled new policies and mechanisms for hosts to finally start paying long-overdue local taxes on their rentals.
Board of Supervisors President David Chiu’s legislation attempts to strike a balance between protecting housing for permanent city residents — including tenants in rent-controlled units who are being displaced in favor of visiting tourists — and allowing San Franciscans to sometimes rent out rooms through companies such as Airbnb. That practice has mushroomed during the Great Recession even though such short-term rentals of residential units have long been illegal in San Francisco (see “Into thin air,” 8/20/13).
Among other provisions, Chiu’s legislation would require hosts to register with the city and live in their units for at least 275 days per year (thus limiting rental nights to 90), create enforcement procedures for city agencies, and protect below-market-rate and single-room occupancy units from being used as short-term rentals.
But Airbnb has also been snubbing the city for more than two years since the Tax Collector’s Office held public hearings and concluded that short-term rental companies and their hosts are required to collect and pay the city’s Transient Occupancy Tax (aka, the hotel tax), a surcharge of about 15 percent on room rentals usually paid by visiting guests (see “Airbnb isn’t sharing,” 3/19/13).
After other media outlets finally joined the Bay Guardian in raising questions about the impact that Airbnb and other companies was having on San Francisco — and with cities New York City, Berlin, and other cities taking steps to ban short-term rentals — Airbnb announced in March that it would begin collecting and paying the TOT in San Francisco sometime this summer.
But that still hasn’t happened, even though Tax Collector Jose Cisneros recently unveiled a new website clarifying that Airbnb hosts must register as businesses and pay taxes and created a streamlined system for doing so. The office is even allowing Airbnb and other companies to register as “qualified website companies” that collect and pay these taxes on behalf of hosts.
“The law does apply to these transactions,” Cisneros told us. “And the set of requirements are the same for the hosts and the website companies.”
Airbnb didn’t respond to Guardian inquiries for this story.
Meanwhile, an unusually diverse coalition of critics continues to raise concerns about Airbnb and the regulatory legislation, including renter and landlord groups, neighborhood and affordable housing activists, labor leaders, and former members of the Board of Supervisors (including Chiu predecessor, Aaron Peskin) and Planning Commission. They penned a Sept. 15 to Chiu calling for him to delay the legislation.
“Individually and collectively, we have advanced nearly two dozen additional amendments that address the issues raised by short-term residential rentals. While we are not of one mind on every issue or every suggested amendment, we are unanimous in our belief that the process you are pursuing is rushed,” they wrote. “The City will live with the intended (and unintended) consequences of your legislation for many, many years.”
Sources in Chiu’s office had already told the Guardian that he planned to keep the legislation in committee for at least one more hearing so the myriad details can be worked out, as Chiu said at the hearing as well.
“We want to have the time to continue to vet and hear all of the perspectives, and at the end of the day what I hope to do is to be able to move forward and build incentives around something that is far better than our current status quo,” Chiu said at the hearing. “This is a very complicated issue, and we all know that we need to get this policy as right as we can.”
Planning Director John Rahaim conveyed concerns from the Planning Commission that the legislation beef up the city’s ability to regulate short-term rentals.
“The commission does believe that the law should be updated to create a legal avenue for those who do want to host,” Rahaim said. “However, currently there are about 5,000 units in the city engaging in short-term rentals. It’s very difficult to know if there are units not being lived in by a full-time resident.”
A long line of speakers wound completely around the packed chamber in City Hall, awaiting their turn to speak publicly to supervisors and city residents, from 20-somethings making a lives renting out their homes to longtime tenants fearing that home-sharing will hurt city’s character.
Airbnb was represented at the hearing by David Owen, a former City Hall staffer who is now director of public policy for the company, and he was publicly confronted by Chiu on the tax issue. Chiu criticized Airbnb for failing to start collecting those taxes as promised.
“As of now, we are extremely close and you will be hearing from us about that in the near future,” Owen said, provoking audible disbelief from many in the crowd. “We have been working diligently alongside the city. This is a complicated set of issues and those involved have all worked in earnest to facilitate this request.”
When Owen was asked about enforcement of the maximum number of nights a tenant has rented out his unit, he said Airbnb’s cooperation is “akin to the city asking Home Depot.com for a list of home care purchases to see if anyone had illegally renovated their bathroom.” But city officials say they need the company’s cooperation to address its impacts. “We don’t want data, just the number of nights per permanent resident so that we can ensure that the bad outcomes of this setup aren’t occurring,” Sup. Jane Kim said. “Airbnb profits from this industry, and therefore [is] accountable to the city.”
Is Burning Man really making Bay Area technology titans, right-wing ideologues, and other uber-capitalists more community-minded? Do they really come back from the desert feeling more goodwill toward their fellow humans and then push egalitarian innovations to help the masses?
That’s one of the biggest reasons that burner apologists cite in defending the festival from any criticisms, responding to the raft of recent articles critical of how Burning Man is developing, including my own, with their own pieces extolling how the festival is making the world a better place. The rhetoric gets downright creepy and cult-like at times, summarily dismissing all dissent.
Frankly, I’ve long hoped that the stated ethos of Burning Man really would seep out into the world and influence our greed-based economic and political systems. There were even moments over the last 10 years when I really believed it might be happening. But I think that potential has been lost as the party and spectacle that is Burning Man overwhelmed the stated communitarian ethos that underlies it.
Right-wing firebrand Grover Norquist attended Burning Man this year and had a lovely time, as he explained in a UK Guardian opinion piece yesterday and a New York magazine article. Those who hosted him in Black Rock City LLC-run First Camp and showed him around even told us that Norquist “gets it” and how that will help Burning Man going forward.
But there’s a deceptiveness and a hollowness to this rhetoric, by both Norquist and the burner true believers. After all, Norquist flew onto the playa and stayed in accomodations that others set up for him and cleaned up after he left, cooking his meals for him while he was there.
Yet Norquist still has the audacity to write, “The story of Burning Man is one of radical self-reliance….The demand for self-reliance at Burning Man toughens everyone up. There are few fools, and no malingerers. People give of themselves – small gifts like lip balm or tiny flashlights. I brought Cuban cigars.”
Burning Man’s stated principle of Radical Self-Reliance is the one Norquist focused in on because it reinforced his libertarian worldview and belief that selfish actions somehow provide for the common good, and he’s now using Burning Man to promote that notion, to the glee of its leaders.
“A community that comes together with a minimum of ‘rules’ demands self-reliance – that everyone clean up after themselves and help thy neighbor. Some day, I want to live 52 weeks a year in a state or city that acts like this. I want to attend a national political convention that advocates the wisdom of Burning Man,” he writes.
Will Norquist also promote “Civic Responsibility” and “Communal Effort,” also stated burner principles, to his wealthy patrons? After all, the city he enjoyed wasn’t free. Maybe he didn’t pay $380 for his ticket, but most attendees do, much like paying taxes is the price of living in civil society, despite Norquist’s fierce opposition to taxes and government.
But there are other dangerous dynamics at play on the playa that would probably make Grover’s small heart grow three sizes larger, particularly the exploitation of labor by a handful of powerful elites. After all, Black Rock City LLC and its six board members claim the full economic value of all the volunteer labor that builds the city each year, from the art to the big theme camps to the people working gate in the middle of the night, hundreds of thousands of hours of volunteer labor.
At its core, libertarianism denies the very notion of exploitation, or that our freedom is limited by the dwindling economic opportunities that are available to us and the power some have to game markets. It promotes a deregulated world in which those with economic and political power can do pretty much whatever they want — something most progressives see as a race to the bottom that exploits both human and natural resources.
It’s no surprise that Norquist is a big fan of the so-called “sharing economy,” in which companies such as Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft help commodify and monetize people’s homes and vehicles, essentially creating low-wage jobs with no benefits while being heedless of their impacts on local housing markets or established employers like hotel or taxi companies.
Tech titans have been coming to Burning Man since the beginning, and I haven’t seen any evidence in San Francisco that they’ve internalized or promoted the principles of civic responsibility, communal effort, or decommodification. Burning Man may seem like a libertarian paradise to a casual observer, but clean-up crews will be there for the rest of the month to make the “leave no trace” ideal a reality, many big theme camps will be holding fundraisers all fall to pay off their debt from this year, and it’ll be up to cops and courts to decide what justice demands for the woman tragically killed by an art car this year.
Like most libertarians, Grover wants all the benefits of government — public roads, unspoiled federal lands, police protection of person and property, and other services that make Burning Man possible — he just doesn’t think the wealthy should pay their fair share for it.
I had dinner last night with Rev. Billy Talen, the inspiring anti-corporate activist at the center of the NYC-based Church of Stop Shopping and close friend of the festival’s organizers, and he’s also bothered by the trends he’s seeing at Burning Man, and openly wondering when the volunteers (like a surly one he encountered at the gate this year while Norquist was being feted inside First Camp) are going to catch on to the game.
That’s what a lot of people are wondering these days, how long Burning Man will still remain a vibrant and interesting place as more and more people pay to come watch and appreciate the hard work of a dwindling percentage of burners willing to put their time, sweat, and energy into making Black Rock City what it is each year.
And if there really is a larger societal value to the wealthy CEOs who come to party in exclusive camps and private art cars, then I think we’re all still waiting to see what that looks like. And waiting. In the meantime, Burning Man seems to be going the way of Animal Farm, where “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” that Orwellian distillation of a list of once-egalitarian principles.
EDITORIAL The San Francisco Board of Supervisors returned to work this week after a month-long summer recess. While it may be too much to expect the supervisors to seriously tackle the many pressing issues facing this city during the fall election season, that’s exactly what needs to happen.
The city has been cruising along on auto-pilot, propelled by inertia more than any coherent political leadership, its elected leaders content to throw political platitudes and miniscule policy remedies at huge problems that are fundamentally changing the city.
While the eastside of the city is being rapidly transformed by rampant development, with no real plan for the displacement and gentrification that it’s causing, the westside still has suburban levels of density and no plan for shouldering its share of this city’s growth pressures. It’s good to see Sup. Katy Tang take a small step toward addressing the problem with her recently introduced Sunset District Blueprint, which seeks to build up to 1,000 new homes there over the next 10 years, that conceptual framework will require political will and more concrete goals to become reality.
To serve the density that westside residents are going to have to accept, the city and its Transportation Authority also must fast-track the Geary Bus Rapid Transit program that has languished for far too long. And the city’s “Complete Streets” and “Vision Zero” transportation reforms need to become more than just slogans, instead backed by the funding and commitment they need to become reality.
Similarly, there’s no reason why the Mayor’s Office, Planning Department, and pro-growth supervisors should be waiting for voters to act on Proposition K, the watered-down housing advisory measure, before they create a plan for implementing Mayor Ed Lee’s long-stated goal of building 30,000 new housing units, more than 30 percent of them affordable. That should have already happened before the promise was made.
This week, while the Board of Supervisors was slated to approve master lease agreements with the US Navy to develop Treasure Island, the city still isn’t seriously addressing concerns about radioactive contamination on the island or the project’s half-baked transportation plan.
Another important issue facing this compassionate city is how to provide legal representation for the waves of child refugees from Central America facing deportation in immigrations courts here in San Francisco. Board President David Chiu proposed a $100,000 allocation for such legal representation, which is a joke, and the board should instead approve the something closer to the $1.2 million commitment that Sup. David Campos has proposed.
We could go on and on (for example, when will Airbnb make good on its past-due promise to pay city hotel taxes?), but the point is: Get to work!
To call seminal SF perfomer and alpha theater aficionado Arturo Galster merely a “drag queen” is to do his range — from the legendary Vegas in Space movie and pitch-perfect live-sung Pasty Cline interpretations to his recent technicolor turns with the Thrillpeddlers — a disservice. But his name will always call to mind that moment in the late ’80s and early ’90s when SF’s drag scene unmoored itself from polite old school diva kabuki into a squall of gloriously punky, ironic camp.
Arturo was always the epitome of grace and professional onstage focus, of course, whether hilariously and touchingly channeling broken stars in Dirty Little Showtunes and Hedwig or playing little Rhoda’s beleaguered mom in a hysterical take-off of The Bad Seed. Many well-known drag queens and entertainers recall first being inspired to take to the stage after seeing Arturo’s performances.
His death was announced by his close friend Helen Shumaker on her Facebook page. According to IMDB, Arturo was born in 1972 (that may be debatable, but he always looked fabulous!)
The cirumstances of his death are unknown. Other comments seem to indicate there was an altercation in Dolores Park after Saturday’s “Showgirls: Night of a Thousand Lapdances” at Castro Theatre, and that Arturo sustained a head wound, but refused medical attention. As of this writing, no charges have been filed and further medical information was unavailable.
On hearing the news, SF’s underground queer arts community took to Facebook to express their condolences and share stories.
Peaches Christ:
It’s a sad, sad night in the Bay Area as we mourn the loss of a brilliant entertainer, artist, and friend. R.I.P. Arturo Galster
Heklina (Trannyshack):
Arturo Galster, you were one of the first people to make a huge impact on me when I first moved to SF, when I first saw you perform at the Castro St. Fair in 1991. You had just come back from Japan, and to me you were a superstar. Thanks for always being so brilliant, I can’t believe you’re not here any more….
Marc Huestis, producer:
RIP Arturo Galster- I’m in a state of shock, and please tell me it’s not true, but just heard Arturo has died. He was THE MOST brilliant performer and loyal to a core. So fun loving it was scary. In so many of my shows since the 80’s I feel a bit of San Francisco Theatre history has been ripped from my heart. We MUST properly memorialize him….Arturo – or Smartie as I called him- sang the first song in the first show I did at the Castro almost 20 years ago- and then went on singing, and acting, and clowning. He was simply the best. He was also THE GREATEST audience member, when he was not onstage cheering on his fellow artist. That is a rare quality.He was generous kind, sassy without being mean-spirited. He was also a good neighbor and old friend.
D’Arcy Drollinger (entertainer):
I still remember staring at a Patsy Cline and the Memphis G-Spots poster on my friend Jessica’s wall when I was 16. I was in awe. And years later, I remember the first day I met him, when he came into the New Government on Haight Street, just having returned from Japan. I was still in awe. I could never shake that feeling – working with him – playing with him – I couldn’t help feel that I was in the presence of a celebrity. He was hilarious. He was ridiculous. He was a genius. And you could never tame him. A true original. A humble diva. I salute you Arturo Galster.
Lisa Geduldig (comedian, promoter):
One of the funniest things I ever heard him say was as Patsy Cline years ago after singing “Walkin’After Midnight;” he told then Mayor Willie Brown: “The reason I was out walking after midnight was because the damn MUNI never came.” Arturo loved showing his Airbnb guests around. Since we lived around the corner from each other, I often ran into them on the street as they were off to dinner or just coming back. Not only did Arturo warm his way into all of his friends’ hearts but these 103 strangers’ as well
Ste Fischell (Thrillpeddlers):
So sad to hear about the loss of Arturo Galster. Arturo was what I wanted to be when I became an old theater queen. I loved him so. He loved me. He was a wonderful talent. I will never forget every night in Pearls Over Shanghai watching him from behind, slumped down as Red Dragon, deliver the best monologue in the show. As my mother in The Bad Seed, making hundreds and hundreds laugh and upstaging everyone. As Hedwig Number 1 … killing it every time. Signing country tunes with you. Telling me you are the Set Fishell of the future. I should be so lucky. I’m shocked. Saddened. I love you Arturo. I always will.
Rotimi Agbabiaka (SF Mime Troupe):
I’m so shocked and saddened to hear of Arturo Galster’s passing. I remember the first time I met him. He was singing as Patsy Cline and I was so moved by his beautiful performance. I told him so and he responded with such grace and humility. It was always such a delight to crossed paths with him after that first meeting and I longed to one day work with him. He was a generous, welcoming man with exquisite talent and a glorious laugh. Hearing him guffaw in the audience at a performance of mine always lifted my spirits so. And being in his enormous presence was a gift. I will miss him.
There’s a party in the VIP lounge. Host, Diet Popstitute and Hostess Miss Kitty Litter Green. The guest of honor is Arturo Galster, and it is the party to end all parties… Please save me a mock tail. I’ll meet you there, because I am not done loving on Y’all yet!!! I love you…..
You can see more tributes and fabulous pics on Arturo’s Facebook page. I, too, recall being wowed out of my skin at Arturo’s Patsy Cline and always getting a warm, excited nod when I ran into him at performances. Thank you for all the laughs (and tears!) RIP.
For feedback, you can reach me at marke@sfbg.com, through Twitter @SFBG, or via our Facebook page.
Airbnb and other companies that facilitate illegal short-term apartment rentals to tourists visiting San Francisco need to engage in a more honest and direct dialogue with this city’s political leaders and stakeholders, something that became clear during last week’s Planning Commission hearing on legislation that would legalize and regulate short-term sublets.
This is a complicated, vexing issue that defies simple solutions, as Board of Supervisors President David Chiu learned as he and his aides spent more than year developing the legislation. They did a pretty good job at striking a balance between letting people occasionally rent out their homes and preventing Airbnb from being used to remove apartments from the already strained local housing market.
A key provision for striking that balance was to limit rentals to no more than 90 nights per year, but the Planning Commission — dominated by appointees from Mayor Ed Lee, who has long coddled Airbnb’s scofflaw approach to the city (see “Into thin air,” 8/6/13) — removed that provision, which the Board of Supervisors should reinstate.
The commission also seemed to side with landlords who want to prevent their tenants from renting out rooms, calling for landlords to be notified when their tenants seek to become Airbnb hosts, another provision the board should reject. Landlords using Airbnb to get around rent control laws is at least as bad as tenants who violate their leases by subletting rooms, and this legislation shouldn’t favor one group over the other.
If the city decides to end its decades-old ban on short-term apartment rentals, it should have a compelling reason to do so. Maybe we want to allow struggling city residents to make some extra money while they’re out of town, or to have some flexibility in renting out rooms without taking on permanent tenants, which are legitimate if difficult policy questions.
But it seems like much of the discussion is about how to rein in the widespread violation of city housing and tax laws caused by Airbnb, which has refused requests to share more of its occupancy data, dodged its obligation to collect the city’s transient occupancy tax, and failed to even send a high-level representative to last week’s hearing. Yet the legislation would require the company’s cooperation to help enforce the regulations.
If Airbnb and its hosts want the city to legalize lucrative short-term rentals in San Francisco, then the company should be willing to engage in high-level public discussions with city leaders to shape this important legislation, rather than simply whipping its hosts into a libertarian frenzy with deceptive public relations campaigns.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has gotten rich with a business model that is illegal in its home city, so the very least he can do is show up at City Hall next month to make a good faith effort to help solve the divisive problems that his company is creating.
High school students with Youth Movement of Justice Organizing (Youth MOJO), a teen leadership program affiliated with the Chinese Progressive Association, rallied at San Francisco City Hall Aug. 7 in a show of support for two citywide measures slated to appear on the November ballot.
The first would raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2018. The second, known as the anti-speculation tax, would impose a steep financial penalty on real estate investors who sell apartment buildings within five years of purchase, an effort to reverse the rising trend of Ellis Act evictions and limit skyrocketing rental prices.
High school student Alice Kuang, who has been active with Youth MOJO since last year, said she felt the effort to preserve affordability was critical for Chinese families who typically earn low wages. “I lived in an SRO in Chinatown for 13 years,” she explained, referring to a single-room occupancy hotel, a dormitory-style housing complex. Throughout the city, thousands of low-income tenants rely on SROs for affordable housing, but these units have been subjected to price increases and have started to become lost as affordable housing stock when they’re listed as short-term rentals on Airbnb.
“In the SRO, it was like one big community,” Kuang said. “Everyone supported each other. Like my mom knew exactly who was boiling water and then, to make sure the water didn’t spill over, she would run up to knock on people’s doors and be like, hey, your food’s done. It was a really strong community. I remember living there since I was born. It was a very small room. The four of us lived in it — we had a bunk bed, and another bunk bed, basically.”
Jessica Ng, a recent high school graduate and Youth MOJO member, said she was focused on advocating for the minimum wage proposal. “One of my parents became unemployed last year so it really took a toll on me, and made me realize that I have to also help,” she said, “like paying my part of the bill, or paying for groceries even.”
She said an internship with Young Asian Women Against Violence helped her earn some supplementary household income. “When I started getting a paycheck every three weeks or so, I started to pay my part of the bill,” she said. “With an increase in the minimum wage, it would really help with people who are my age who are going to college and want to help their families.”
At the start of a public hearing, Chiu gave an overview, explaining that it would allow permanent residents – defined as San Franciscans dwelling in the city for at least nine months out of the year – to legally post their residences for short-term rent up to 90 days out of the year, legitimizing a practice that is technically prohibited under a city law prohibiting rentals of less than 30 days.
Under the proposed regulations, hosts would be required to register with the city, pay all associated taxes and sign up for liability insurance.
Anyone in violation, for example by posting a unit on Airbnb.com without registering, could be subjected to fines. While Chiu noted that he thought short-term rentals ought to be regulated to limit the threat Airbnb rentals pose to affordable housing in pricey San Francisco, he sought to strike a balance, saying, “Home sharing has allowed struggling residents to live in our expensive city.”
Public comment on the measure lasted for several hours. A host of speakers came out to share stories about how short-term rentals had helped them earn supplementary income and remain in San Francisco (as the Guardian previously reported, Airbnb sought to line up supporters via an online campaign effort called Fair to Share).
Yet opponents of the measure raised concerns that the new rule legitimizing short-term rentals via Airbnb could exacerbate San Francisco’s tremendous affordability crisis, by allowing residential spaces to be further commodified.
“There’s no hope we’re going to be able to control the adverse impacts of this legislation,” said Doug Engmann, a former planning commissioner. “This ill-conceived way of rezoning the city … causes all sorts of problems about how you’re going to be able to regulate this going forward.”
Ian Lewis, of hotel workers’ union Unite Here Local 2, warned of the impact on those employed by the city’s hotel industry.
“This legislation in one fell swoop is a green-light to legalizing short-term rentals,” said Lewis. “No one is more affected by this than hotel workers.”
Land use attorney Sue Hestor warned that Mayor Ed Lee’s proposal to construct 30,000 housing units “will be a farce … without a requirement that they really be rented or occupied as housing,” and suggested prohibiting the new units envisioned under this plan from being listed as short-term rentals on Airbnb.
Others raised concerns about the regulation’s lack of enforceability, and were critical of the provision allowing for 90 days of short-term rentals (many believed it was too permissive, but advocates who came out expressing support for Airbnb said it should be increased to 180 days).
The Board of Supervisors will take up the legislation in September after returning from August recess.
Jerry Day, when deadheads spanning generations congregate around the Bay Area to celebrate the legacy of SF native Jerry Garcia, should maybe start going by Jerry Week: Friday, Aug. 1 saw sold-out crowds at Berkeley’s Greek Theater and San Rafael’s Terrapin Crossroads for performances led by Warren Haynes and Stu Allen, respectively, while the official 12th annual Jerry Day celebration on Aug. 3 brought the masses to the city for Melvin Seals & the JGB and tons more at McLaren Park. Missed ’em? Don’t worry: Aug. 12 is Jerry Garcia Tribute Night at AT&T Park.
AIRBNB’S GAFFE-STROTURF?
Last week, Airbnb sent out an email blast proclaiming: “Big News: Launching Fair to Share San Fransisco!” [sic]. Misspellings happen, and hey, we all make mistakes. But what is Fair to Share? It’s “working for fair rules for home sharing,” according to the blast, linking to an online petition “urging the Board of Supervisors and San Francisco leaders to enact rules that let people share the home in which they live.” More to the point, this “coalition” seems focused on weakening enforcement provisions in legislation moving forward to regulate short-term rentals. So there you have it, SF’s newest grassroots movement — backed by a company valued at $10 billion.
SENIORS VERSUS SHUTTLES
Octogenarians unite! On the first day of the tech shuttle pilot program, last Friday a group of 25 or so seniors and people with disabilities blocked two Mission tech shuttles from making their morning tech sojourn to Silicon Valley. “Stop the senior evictions!” they shouted, alleging that 70 percent of no-fault evictions since 2011 were within four blocks of the shuttle stops, and two thirds of those evictions were of seniors. The 30-something tech workers looked ignored their elders, smartphones in hand, safely ensconced in their corporate buses.
REMEMBERING THE I-HOTEL
Nearly four decades ago, thousands of San Franciscans blockaded sheriffs from evicting seniors from the International Hotel, the last vestige of the Filipino community known as Manilatown. Eventually the sheriffs were successful, but the shameful displacement helped spur many San Francisco rental protections we enjoy today. Last week, the International Hotel Manilatown Center honored the anniversary of this dark mark on the city’s history. “We fought as long as we could,” Peter Yamamoto told us, who was 23 when he fought the evictions so long ago. “That night was like electricity.”
ON A HIGH NOTE
The San Francisco Opera kicks off its 92nd season Sept. 4 with a new production of Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma, starring soprano Sondra Radvonovsky, pictured, as the Druid priestess who falls in love a Roman soldier (spoiler: it doesn’t end well). The fall season — which also includes the work that started it all for SF Opera back in 1923, Puccini’s La Bohème, in November — continues Sept. 6 with the opening of Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, with another stellar soprano, Patricia Pacette, playing the falsely accused Appalachian heroine. Opening weekend also includes the ever-popular “Opera in the Park” Sept. 7 in Sharon Meadow, for those who prefer their arias free and open-air. www.sfopera.com. PHOTO BY MARTY SOHL
WEINER TAKES ALL
Did you hear the pitter-patter of little feet over the weekend? If it wasn’t your child (or your pesky biological clock playing tricks on you), it was most likely the Wienerschnitzel Wiener Dog Race Nationals — the Bay Area regionals portion of which drew hundreds to the Santa Clara County Fair. They scampered! They leapt! The totally got distracted and lost interest in that cute little wiener dog way! Who put the most “dash” in “dachshund”? Why, Wally the Wiener of Gilroy, who took home $250 and a trip to San Diego for the national races.
HEY, SUGAR DADDY
We’re normally weirded out by pop culture-food trend tie-ins, but when Tout Sweet Patisserie (Macy’s Union Square, 170 O’Farrell St., 3rd Fl, www.toutsweetsf.com) chef Yigit Pura announced the launch of the “Hedwig Schmidt” macaron — in honor of beloved Tony-sweeper Hedwig and the Angy Inch — we totally bit. Bourbon-orange marmalade ganache with a brandied cherry center, covered in edible red glitter? Danke, mister!
IRON MAN: APP DEVELOPER?
Because San Francisco doesn’t have enough tech CEO megalomaniacs, Marvel Comics had to fictionalize one: Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, is headed to the city by the bay. Okay, not actually (sorry fellow geeks, Iron Man is fictional), but in the comic book world, the Manhattan-based metallic hero will develop apps by day, and rocket about in his new all white, iPod-esque armor by night. But why not an everyman superhero, like say, Spiderman? Remember, Peter Parker is a photographer: He’d probably move to Oakland.
It seems people are agitating for change on all sides of a debate swirling around Airbnb, the San Francisco-based apartment-sharing company whose new logo, by the way, is rumored to be something special.
Turns out, there’s a rolling drumbeat on the other side of the fence, too, resembling a grassroots campaign – yet promulgated by Airbnb itself. Yesterday, Airbnb sent out an email blast proclaiming: “Big News: Launching Fair to Share San Fransisco!” [sic] (#fail).
Misspellings happen, and hey, we all make mistakes. More to the point, what’s Fair to Share want, and when do they want it?
Fair to Share “is working for fair rules for home sharing,” according to the blast, which directs recipients to sign an online petition “urging the Board of Supervisors and San Francisco leaders to enact rules that let people share the home in which they live.”
The blast describes Fair to Share as a coalition, comprised of Airbnb, a company valued at $10 billion; Peers, a nationwide online organizing group whose rise coincided with early signs of regulatory action targeting the sharing economy, and Home Sharers of San Francisco, a group we at the Guardian previously hadn’t heard of.
Perhaps Fair to Share’s motto could be: “Airbnb hosts of the world, unite!”
As the Guardian has previously reported, Board President David Chiu has been working for more than a year to craft legislation regulating short-term rentals, partially in response to the problem that rent-controlled housing stock is quietly being lost to conversions to short-term Airbnb rentals, a practice carried out both by tenants and landlords.
City law technically prohibits apartment rentals of less than 30 days, a measure geared toward preserving the city’s rental stock. Chiu’s legislation, developed in tandem with the San Francisco Tenants Union, would actually help legitimize Airbnb by legalizing short-term rentals in residential areas – with a number of conditions, including a requirement that hosts register with the city and limit rentals to no more than 90 days per year.
According to a “fact sheet” published by Fair to Share, the average Airbnb host earns $4,000 a year by renting out their space. The website also emphasizes that a great many Airbnb hosts, presumably tenants, use the supplemental cash gleaned from online rentals to “stay in their homes,” the subtext here being that rent is so goddamn expensive in this city that welcoming perfect strangers into your home as overnight guests is a matter of basic economic survival (also, sharing is awesome!).
Airbnb’s focus on cash-strapped hosts might lead people to believe that their economic security is somehow threatened by the proposed legislation. But that isn’t the case. The $4,000-per-year average earning potential would go completely unaffected if hosts were limited to the 90 rental days per year proposed by Chiu’s legislation. So why are people being urged to ban together with Fair to Share and join the revolution pushing back against regulatory control?
A closer read of the petition reveals that Airbnb and the Home Sharers of San Francisco are actually worried about the proposed law’s enforcement mechanisms, including a registry that Airbnb hosts would be required to enroll in. The point of these enforcement provisions in the proposed legislation, which will likely be decided on this fall, are to ensure that the rules on short-term rentals are being followed instead of flouted.
Is it fair to share? Sure. But ousting long-term San Francisco tenants to set up a property as a hotel in violation of city law isn’t a very good example of sharing. And that’s the sort of behavior this new regulation is targeting.
As the San Francisco Planning Commission prepares for an Aug. 7 hearing on Sup. David Chiu’s widely watched legislation to legalize and regulate short-term apartment rentals through Airbnb and similar companies, the San Francisco Tenants Union tomorrow [Tues/29] launches a “citizen enforcement” campaign against these currently illegal rentals.
Seeking to highlight the fact that “hundreds of tenants have been evicted and thousands of rent-controlled apartments in San Francisco have been illegally converted to hotel rooms in violation of two San Francisco laws,” SFTU announced it will begin posting signs on illegally converted buildings to warn tourists that the rentals are displacing city residents.
The campaign starts tomorrow at noon at 1937 Mason Street, a three-unit building where SFTU says all tenants were evicted under the Ellis Act so the units could be rented out through Airbnb and other online rental services. It’s the latest step in SFTU’s campaign to highlight illegal conversions, filing more than 50 complaints with the city and threatening further legal action. [UPDATE: A senior Airbnb official told the Guardian that no Airbnb hosts have rented out units at this address. Gullicksen said the units were rented out through VRBO.com, an Airbnb competitor].
“San Francisco is facing a severe housing crisis with soaring rents and evictions,” said SFTU Director Ted Gullicksen said in a press release. “It’s intolerable that the City is tolerating thousands of illegal conversions and thus facilitating hundreds of evictions.”
Apartment rentals of less than 30 days have long been illegal under city laws, including Administrative Code 41A, in order to protect the city’s rental stock for permanent residents. SFTU worked with Chiu’s office in crafting legislation that would legalize short-term rentals in residential areas but set a number of conditions, including a requirement for hosts to register with the city and limit rentals to no more than 90 days per year.
Airbnb is headquartered in San Francisco, but it has long defied city law and refused to collect required transient occupancy taxes on its rentals even after the city definitely ruled they were owed. The company pledged to finally start collecting the taxes sometime this summer and it has sought to make over its scofflaw public image with new branding and outreach efforts.
But with the company facing similar criticisms of its business model in New York City, Berlin, and other cities with strong housing demand, San Francisco’s regulatory effort is expected to be a high-stakes and high-profile struggle that will ultimately be decided by the Board of Supervisors, probably sometime this fall.
The annual J-Pop Summit in Japantown drew a lively crowd of anime and other Japanese pop culture treasures to Japantown last weekend (including Shin, pictured). This year’s festivities included a Ramen Festival portion, featuring noodle cooks from around the world — and lines up to two hours long to sample their rich, brothy creations. PHOTO BY REBECCA BOWE
DA LOBBYIST
Former San Francisco Mayor and current Chronicle columnist Willie Brown, often just called Da Mayor, is widely acknowledged to be one of the most politically influential individuals in San Francisco. But until recently, he’d never registered as a lobbyist with city government. Now it’s official: Brown has been tapped as a for-real lobbyist representing Boston Properties, a high-powered real-estate investment firm that owns the Salesforce Tower. News outlets (including the Bay Guardian) have pointed out for years that despite having received payments for high-profile clients, Brown has never formally registered, leaving city officials and the public in the dark. Da Mayor, in turn, has seemed unfazed.
GAZA PROTEST
On July 20, marked as the deadliest day yet in the Israeli-Gaza conflict, hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters gathered in San Francisco to march against the ongoing violence. Waving flags, participants chanted “Free, free Palestine!” and progressed from the Ferry Building to City Hall. It was just one of hundreds of protests staged worldwide in response to the bloodshed. As of July 21, the Palestinian death toll had risen to about 500, while 25 Israeli soldiers were killed. PHOTO BY STEPHANY JOY ASHLEY
PET CAUSE
Last year, the SF SPCA (www.sfspca.org) assisted with over 5,000 cat and dog adoptions. With its new adoption center near Bryant and 16th Streets, which opened June 13, it aims to increase capacity by 20 percent — saving 1,000 more furry lives in the process. The new facility features improved condo-style enclosures rather than cages, a small indoor dog park, and SF-themed climbing structures for cats. (So far, there’s a Golden Gate Bridge, a Transamerica Pyramid, a cable car, the Sutro Tower, and the SF Giants logo; a Castro Theatre design is in the works.) These improvements make the shelter life more comfortable for the animals, but they also help entice visitors, making the adoption process “a fun, happy experience,” says SF SPCA media relations associate Krista Maloney. See more kitties and puppies at the Pixel Vision blog at www.sfbg.com. PHOTO BY CHERY EDDY
MIX IT UP
The quarterly SF Mixtape Society event brings together people of all, er, mixes with one thing in common: a love of the personally curated playlist. This time around (Sun/27, 4pm-6pm, free. The MakeOut Room, 3225 24th St, SF. www.sfmixtapesociety.com) the theme is “Animal Instinct.” You can bring a mixtape in any format to participate — CD, USB, etc. (although anyone who brings an actual cassette will “nab a free beer and respect from peers.”) Awards will be given in the following categories: best overall mixtape, audience choice, and best packaging. Hit that rewind!
CODERS FOR KOCH
This week San Francisco plays host to the Libertarian conference/slumber-party Reboot 2014, aimed at — you guessed it — tech workers. Conservatives and government-decrying libertarians are natural allies, wrote Grover Norquist, scion of the anti-tax movement, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Uber swerves around transportation regulations, Airbnb slinks under housing regulations. It’s no wonder politically marginalized libertarians are frothing at the mouth to ally with Silicon Valley’s ascendant billionaires. Reboot 2014 speaker Rand Paul’s recent meeting with Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, and Peter Thiel should have liberals all worried.
BART CLEANSING
BART announced via a press release they’d begin “ensuring safe evacuation” of downtown BART stations. By this they mean they’ll start sweeping out anyone sitting or laying down in the stations, clearly targeting the homeless. Deflecting those accusations, BART said they are one of the few transportation agencies with a dedicated outreach and crisis intervention coordinator, as if that gives them a pass.
CLIFF JUMPING
At 66, Jimmy Cliff put on one of the most energetic live shows we’ve ever seen on Saturday, July 19 at the Fillmore, high-kicking through newer songs, like “Afghanistan,” an updated version of eternal protest song “Vietnam,” as well as the classics: “The Harder They Come,” “Many Rivers to Cross,” etc. Check the Noise blog at www.sfbg.com for a full review.
“Die techie scum.” Those words are sprayed ominously on sidewalks throughout San Francisco. They’re plastered on stickers stamped on lampposts. They’re even scrawled in the bathrooms of punk bars, the very establishments now populated by Google-Glass-wearing tech aficionados.
Journalists from San Francisco to New York have opined on the source of the hate: Is it the housing crisis? Tech-fueled gentrification? Rising inequality? Those same journalists later parachute into the tech industry to periodically peer at its soul: Is tech diverse enough? Is it sexist? Is it a true meritocracy?
Those issues are often looked at in a vacuum, but perhaps they shouldn’t be. Perhaps those problems are all interconnected, and solving tech’s diversity problem is also part of solving income inequality in San Francisco, giving longtime San Franciscans a chance to join the industry many now view as composed of outsiders and interlopers.
The average Silicon Valley tech worker makes about $100,000, according to Dice Holdings Inc., which conducts annual tech salary surveys. Opportunity in the tech sector may bolster San Francisco’s middle-income earners, vanishing like wayward sea lions from the city’s landscape. Statistics from the US Census Bureau show that 66 percent of the city is either very poor or very rich, showing a hollowing out of the middle class.
Some tech CEOs are addressing their employment needs with a foreign workforce. Mark Zuckerberg and a cadre of tech CEOs have lobbied Senate and House Republicans to reform immigration in their favor, hoping to lure out-of-country workers to fill tech’s employment vacancies. Politico reported Sean Parker gave upwards of $500,000 to Republicans in 2014, all for the cause of immigration reform.
Conversely, a movement is already underway to bring San Franciscans into tech’s fold, based on the idea of a win-win scenario: San Francisco’s public school students are overwhelmingly diverse and lower income, while the tech industry is not.
Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Yahoo recently released their diversity numbers, showing the companies are mostly white and male. This accusation has long haunted Silicon Valley.
Two years ago, Businessweek heralded the “Rise of the Brogrammer.” The stereotype is as follows: He preens as he programs in his popped collar, his startup funds fuel the city as he hunts “the ladies,” and he is insensitive toward women in the workplace in the most fratboy-like way imaginable.
Biz dev VP of @path just cracked lame jokes re: “nudie calendars,” frat guys + “hottest girls,” “gangbang” at #swsx talk. Cue early exit.
But while outlier brogrammer douche-bros certainly exist, whose classist opinions ignite widespread ire (think Greg Gopman’s statement comparing homeless people to “hyenas”), the real brogrammer threat is more insidious, more systemic.
“The brogrammer is always someone else,” wrote Kate Losse, a freelance journalist, in an April blog post. “He is THOSE Facebook guys who yell too loudly at parties and wave bottles in the air, he is not the nice, shy guy who gets paid 30 percent more because of his race, gender and appeal to the boy-genius fetishes of [venture capitalists].”
The overarching point of Losse’s article was this: There is a subtle sexism, and also racism, in the tech sector, which shuts out women and people of color. The looming stereotype of a douchey brogrammer can obscure the smaller, more indirect ways in which minorities and women are shut out of the industry.
Tech’s disturbing (but unsurprising) lack of diversity is being highlighted amid an economic backdrop that has resulted in widespread displacement of San Francisco’s working class and minorities.
Some are seeking to create opportunities for Bay Area communities of color within tech, as a way to even the scales. A swell of new applicants with programming skills — including people of color and women — may soon come knocking. But in the time it will take school-age coders to cycle through the first generation of new computer science classes, Silicon Valley is going to have to take a hard look in the mirror.
Some of the Bay Area’s hate toward tech may be rooted in a perceived lack of access. Longtime residents see a sea of newcomers, often white, often male, who aren’t pulling up a seat for minorities to join the new gold rush.
The age of the brogrammer is now, and it’s as socially progressive as the paleolithic era, meaning: not at all.
FAKE IT TIL YOU MAKE IT
Talk to anyone in the realm of new technology companies and startups, and they’ll surely tell you this: Tech is an inspiring, creative field, where pure skill is the key to unlocking any job you’d like. The dress style is casual (hoodies, of course) and the perks flow like wine (or energy drinks).
When the Guardian visited the CloudCamp social good hackathon, we saw video game arcade machines in the ground floor and beer flowing throughout. Another company, Hack Reactor, had desks attached to treadmills and a life coach on hand to mind employee health. These are accoutrements de rigeuer, stunningly standard. But tales of true Silicon Valley excess abound: One CEO offers employees free helicopter rides, many offer in-house chefs and extravagant travel.
Interns in Silicon Valley are enjoying huge perks like free meals, massages, swimming pools, nap pods: http://t.co/BdaaOdC95P
Skill and ability alone are the keys to unlocking this lifestyle, the tech industry says. Workers’ fervor can take on an almost cult-like zeal.
“I think the sharing economy is addictive,” said Rafael Martinez-Corina, a panelist at the Share2014 sharing economy conference in May, touting tech’s biggest stars like AirBNB, Lyft, and Uber. “Once you get it, you want more and more. You get into car sharing, you want to get into food sharing, time sharing.”
He asked the audience, “Who else is addicted to sharing?”
Almost every hand went in the room shot right up. Cheers immediately followed. Hallelujah!
Mars Jullian, an engineer at AdRoll, told the Guardian that employees of tech companies with name-brand apps tend to exhibit more ego. AdRoll is a big player, but more behind the scenes, she said, giving her perspective on the attitudes of her fellow tech workers.
“Sometimes it seems tech people feel like they own the city,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s the right attitude to have. Sometimes it’s more important to be humble.”
One might forgive the tech workers for their enthusiasm. The industry, after all, has ushered in widespread transformation in business and communications, resulting in dramatic economic shifts. But with such a high concentration of wealth and influence in the Bay Area, the question of who gets to participate is key.
Google’s diversity numbers rocked the world outside Silicon Valley, but surprised few in the Bay Area. The behemoth is 70 percent male and 60 percent white, with Asians making up 30 percent of the company’s ethnic representation.
Soon after Google’s numbers were revealed, Facebook, Yahoo, and LinkedIn followed suit with their own diversity reports. Their numbers differ a bit from Google, showing more Asian employees, and slightly more women. The numbers look worse, however, when only technology jobs are factored in. The tech worker population among these companies is about 15 percent female.
Hadi Partovi, an early Facebook investor, now adviser, and ex-chief of Microsoft’s MSN, told the Guardian that despite the industry’s challenges, tech’s doors are open to people with skills, regardless of background.
“The computer doesn’t know if it’s being programmed by someone rich or poor, black or brown,” he told us in a phone interview. “A lawyer, for instance, is looked at more explicitly. Tech has the opportunity to be more meritocratic.”
But the tech sector’s pious belief that it functions as a world-changing meritocracy ignores a host of factors that serve to hinder inclusion.
Many have touted the education pipeline as the root cause of tech’s lack of diversity. The number of women pursuing science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is stunningly low, 24 percent, according to the US Department of Commerce. African Americans and Latinos also lag far behind their white and Asian counterparts in completing their computer science degrees, according to studies by the East Bay nonprofit Level Playing Field Institute.
Considering Asian groups is important: the Level Playing Field Institute draws a distinction between represented and underrepresented minority groups, acknowledging that ethnicity, income and class intermingle in complex ways. It’s those underrepresented groups like women, Latinos and African Americans LPFI identifies as groups lacking in tech.
But the pipeline is only one part of the problem. Subtle (and not-so-subtle) misogyny and racism, often labeled micro-aggressions, pervade hiring.
Level Playing Field is focused on creating opportunity for people of color and women in STEM fields. In an extensive tech-industry study conducted in 2011, called “Hidden Bias in Information Technology Workplaces,” researchers concluded: “Despite widespread underrepresentation of women and people of color within the sector, diversity is not regarded as a priority.”
Surveying more than 645 engineers, the study’s authors found that white men were the most likely to believe that diversity was not a problem that needed addressing in the tech sector. The study also found that underrepresented people of color (Latinos and African Americans), and women were more likely to encounter exclusionary cliques, unwanted sexual teasing, bullying, and homophobic jokes.
Sometimes, these instances blow up for the world to see.
THE MIRROR-TOCRACY
The workday text messages between Tinder’s co-founder Justin Marteen and former VP Whitney Wolfe went public after Wolfe sued Tinder, revealing the ugly waters women must sometimes navigate in tech. Marteen was allegedly harassing Wolfe over her new love interest, and Wolfe asked him to stop.
“Stop justin [sic]. Were at work,” Wolfe asked of Marteen, to which he replied, “Ur heartless… go talk to ur 26 year old fucking accomplished nobody. I’ll shit on him in life.”
He should have ended there. But he continued his rage at his ex-girlfriend.
“Hagsgagahaha so pathetic I even imagined a life w u. I actually thought u would be a good mother and wife. I have horrible judgement. He can enjoy my left overs,” he allegedly wrote. “You’re effecting my work environment,” she replied, “and this is very out of control. Please don’t do this during work hours.”
Besides an awful command of rudimentary spelling, the squabble showed the very real harassment women in tech are exposed to every day. When Wolfe went to Tinder CEO Sean Rad for help, she found herself out of a job.
Tinder is not an outlier, according to studies by Level Playing Field. Nor is it the only company to see its harassment go public. Earlier this year, GitHub’s CEO Tom Preston-Werner resigned after a former employee, Julie Ann Horvath, alleged she was harassed by him, his wife, and engineers.
While Github denied the allegations, Horvath was defiant: “A company can never own you. They can’t tell you who to fuck and who not to fuck. And they can’t take away your voice.”
But for every example of outright sexism or racism, there are multitudes of more subtle biases in the workplace. Level Playing Field’s studies found these biases are pervasive. They start as early as the hiring process.
Carlos Bueno is a former Facebook engineer, now tinkering behind the scenes at memSQL. He is of mixed ethnicity, Irish and Mexican, among others. “My father called us ‘Leprechan-os’,” he told us.
Bueno trained interviewers at Facebook, and like many there, he also conducted interviews. He said Facebook’s interview process was probably one of the best in the industry for screening out biases of the interviewer, but other companies were not as aware of bias as a problem.
“Every startup wants to be a big dog,” he said, describing the process. “But the point of a startup is to grow very large, very quickly. They don’t have time to learn. Some people take rules of thumb or investor advice and run with it.”
Paypal co-founder Max Levchin is looked to as a thought leader in the startup world. He touts the idea that diversity of perspective in a startup’s early phases can actually hurt its chances of success, hindering its speed in “endless debates.”
Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel once famously put it this way: “Don’t fuck up the culture.”
Bueno pointed to a real estate startup, 42Floors, as an example of a company adopting Levchin’s philosophy. It looks for potential hires who are a “cultural fit,” i.e., making sure the candidate and employer think alike.
One 42Floors interviewer explained this on the company blog: “I asked her how she was doing in the interview process and she said, ‘I’m actually still trying to get an interview. Well, I grabbed coffee with the founder, and I had dinner with the team last night, and then we went to a bar together.’ I chuckled. She was clearly confused with the whole matter. I told her, ‘Look, you just made it to the third round.'”
So the interview process for tech may involve coffee dates or “beer with the guys,” and the onus is on the interviewee to figure all of this out. Similar blog posts from 42Floors go on to call out interviewees who wear suits, or act too stodgy for their liking.
We spoke to Bueno extensively over burgers, but he put it best in his blog.
“You are expected to conform to the rules of The Culture before you are allowed to demonstrate your actual worth,” he wrote. “What wearing a suit really indicates is — I am not making this up — non-conformity, one of the gravest of sins. For extra excitement, the rules are unwritten and ever-changing, and you will never be told how you screwed up.”
Founders back up their faulty hiring practices with faulty logic. “It’s so hard to get in, if you get in you must be good,” Bueno said. “But those two statements don’t support each other.”
Some students of color training to code have already caught a glimpse of how the mirror-tocracy functions.
OPENING THE DOOR
Eight years ago, Kimberly Bryant moved to San Francisco to work in biotech. She moved to the city because she believed it to be more racially and economically diverse. She worked adjacent to Bayview Hunters Point, and has since revised her view of the city as a welcoming multicultural environment.
Instead, she found a city with an African American population dwindling below six percent in a city of over 800,000, and a gutted middle class. Latinos are moving out in greater numbers too. Over the last decade, 1,400 Latinos left the Mission District, according to a recent report on displacement by Causa Justa / Just Cause. In the same time, 2,900 white residents flooded in.
The displacement data reveals a significant parallel: The diverse ethnic groups Silicon Valley lacks in its employed ranks are the very same ethnic groups being priced out of San Francisco.
Seeking to mitigate the ethnic and gender disparity in tech, Bryant formed Black Girls Code, a student mentor and workshop program. It first opened up shop in the Bayview, but has sinced moved on.
“I really saw and experienced the true diversity of the community in Oakland,” Bryant told the Guardian, of the nonprofit’s new home. “It’s just an amazingly incredibly diverse community in terms of race and economy. What San Francisco used to be,” she added, “but is no longer.”
Black Girls Code teaches K-12 students rudimentary coding skills, providing instruction in Ruby and Python. Although companies like Google and others have opened their doors with welcoming arms, she said, convincing her students that the tech world is ready for them has been challenging.
When she brought her young students to an industry event, TechCrunch Disrupt, she dodged a minefield of fratboy-like behavior that made her students feel unwelcome, she said. This is the same event that heralded a prank app called “titstare,” which invited users (presumably male) to upload photos of themselves staring at women’s breasts.
The app was displayed on a stage before some of the most influential players in the tech industry, but Bryant’s students were in the audience too.
“They were shocked, like everyone there. It was disconcerting for the parents and the girls,” she said. Though she’s careful not to overplay the damage done (the girls “laughed awkwardly,” she said), the takeaway of the conference was that women and girls were not the intended participants. “It’s like a frathouse. I thought, ‘oh my god, this is like college all over again. This sucks.'”
At Mission and 19th streets sits MEDA, a nonprofit that has long worked to help Mission residents gain a foothold in San Francisco workplaces. This begins even in the lobby, where a small kitchenette in the corner plays host to a chef who mixes up a mean ceviche, with spices admittedly leaving this reporter in tears. He aspires to open his own restaurant, and MEDA is helping him get there.
The upstairs houses a group of students called the Mission Techies. They seek support in their aspirations to enter the tech industry, but for them the dream may be further off than the chef’s.
Gabriel Medina, policy manager at MEDA, doesn’t mince words. These are the “challenge” kids, he said, but they’ve done him and program manager Leo Sosa proud.
The Mission Techies pull apart computers to learn about their innards.
Sosa described a visit from Google and Facebook engineers who taught his students rudimentary coding skills. One student, Jamar, was so engrossed in programming that one engineer asked: “Is he okay?!”
“Jamar is on the coding program, [and he’s] on fire,” Sosa told the Guardian, while sitting in a MEDA office.
But students like Jamar, an African American San Franciscan, face an uphill battle before they ever get to the step of applying for a job like one at Google.
After visiting some tech offices, the students felt less sure of themselves.
“They were like ‘I don’t see no black guys, I don’t see no Latinos. Leo, do you really think I can get a job here?'” Sosa told us. For them, the mirror-tocracy did not reflect an image they recognized.
By many measures, MEDA’s Mission Techies program is a success, taking kids of modest means and equipping them with digital skills that can aid their employment prospects. Mission Techies, Black Girls Code, and other programs such as Hack Reactor and Mission Bit all nip at the heels of the education pipeline leading to tech industry employment. They also share a common focus: They’re educating largely minority populations, often low-income, and located in the Bay Area.
The solution to tech’s diversity problem and to San Francisco’s displacement may spring from the same well: educate the people who live here to work in the local industry. But in order to do that effectively, afterschool and summer programs alone won’t do the trick.
The schools themselves need disruption.
WORKING TOGETHER
In the midst of the tech hub, the San Francisco Unified School District finds itself surrounded by tech allies. Still, change comes slowly.
Only five of SFUSD’s 17 high schools have computer science courses. Ben Chun, an MIT graduate and former computer science teacher at Galileo High School, told us the outlook is bleak without digital training in schools. Though kids sometimes teach themselves programming at home, most low-income students don’t have that opportunity.
“It’s a privilege thing,” he told us. If you have access to computers at home, you’re more likely to tinker and teach yourself. Those kids are more likely to be the Bill Gates of the future, he said, the self-starters and early computer prodigies.
“If you don’t have those things in place,” he said, “there’s a zero chance it will be you.”
When he first got to Galileo, his computer teacher predecessor taught word processing. But a lot has changed since 2006.
Partovi took his successes at Facebook and Microsoft and parlayed his money into a nonprofit called Code.org. The organization created its own coding classes for kids as young as 6, and compelled 30 school districts nationwide to create computer science courses based on its work.
Code.org’s tutorials have been played by millions of students.
Now it has its sights set on SFUSD’s 52,000 students, potentially solving tech and the school’s problems at once.
“It would for sure level that diversity gap,” Partovi told the Guardian. “All of the data released from Google, Yahoo, and others show a male-dominated industry. The pipeline of educated kids is actually much more diverse.”
But integrating tech in the district is slow, and likely years away. The district needs state standards to require computer science, something SFUSD Superintendent Richard Carranza has already lobbied Gov. Jerry Brown to change.
“The demand [for computer science classes] is coming from everywhere,” Carranza told us, including parents, students, the tech industry, and city leaders.
“What makes it a game changer is the partnership with our tech partners,” he said. “It gives our students the opportunity to interact elbow to elbow with people doing computer science out in the real world.”
But the tech workers those students are interacting with, though well meaning, remain the domain of the brogrammers. Will they hire SFUSD graduates with computer science skills when and if they’re ready? Will they be the right “culture fit?”
“There’s definitely a libertarian thread, a free market, red-toothed nature of things [in tech],” Bueno told us. “Talking to people in unguarded moments, that definitely leaks out. You’re not going to convince anyone by singing kumbaya and holding hands.”
But logical tech workers need look no further than the current numbers facing Silicon Valley to see the need to reach beyond their in-groups: 1.2 million new tech jobs will be created by 2020, studies from the US Department of Labor show. At the same time, 40 percent of the United States will be Latino and black by 2040.
When the minority is the majority, the brogrammers may become a dying species.
A major real-estate firm contributed $1 million to the America’s Cup Organizing Committee at the behest of Mayor Ed Lee, right around the time it sought city approval to expand a downtown tech office building that was already under construction.
Kilroy Realty, the developer of a 30-story building that will house more than 400,000 square feet of office space for Salesforce.com, won approval in August of 2013 to add an additional six floors to its 350 Mission commercial office space project. That building is one of three in the Transbay area that will house Salesforce.com offices.
Kilroy sent one check for $500,000 to the America’s Cup Organizing Committee on June 24, 2013, and a second one for the same amount on Jan. 31 of this year.
While it’s impossible to say for sure whether the generous gifts had anything to do with the request for approval for a major building expansion, the “behested payment” reports documenting the transactions did draw the attention of the San Francisco Civil Grand Jury, which included them in a report titled “Ethics in the City: Promise, Practice, or Pretense?”
In another example highlighted in the report, Mayor Lee accepted travel funds for a trip to China and Korea last October. Contributors who provided more than $500 apiece for that trip included Uber and Airbnb, both tech-based companies whose businesses stand to be directly impacted by city policies.
Uber has been sparring with the San Francisco International Airport over its drivers’ unauthorized passenger drop-offs as of late, while Airbnb long skirted its responsibility to pay the city’s hotel tax and is now the subject of legislation regulating short-term housing rentals. It’s interesting that each of these companies felt compelled to donate toward the mayor’s travel fund, given the city’s attempts to regulate them.
The Civil Grand Jury report highlights the shortcomings of the San Francisco Ethics Commission, an agency tasked with ensuring that government operations aren’t tainted by conflicts of interest or official misconduct.
Citizen watchdogs of San Francisco government have sought to eliminate pay-to-play politics for years.
Back in 2000, San Francisco voters approved a ballot measure seeking to bar elected officials from accepting campaign donations or gifts from corporations or individuals who had received city contracts or “special benefits.”
Known as Proposition J, that measure sought to eliminate the undue influence of deep-pocketed, well-connected players in local government.
It was popular and won by a landslide: No ballot arguments were registered against it, and the measure won with 82.66 percent of the vote.
Nevertheless, the Civil Grand Jury report noted, Prop. J was “amended out of existence” – through an effort led by none other than the Ethics Commission.
“The Ethics Commission proposed repealing Proposition J at their April 2003 meeting,” the report notes.
That proposal was part of an effort to “recodify conflict of interest laws,” the Civil Grand Jury found. Some laws were amended. Others were tweaked so that amendments could be made in the future, without voter approval.
After winning approval from the Board of Supervisors, that package of legislative changes became Proposition E on the 2003 ballot. “In 2003, voters approved Proposition E that recodified the ethics laws; however, it also had the undisclosed effect of deleting Proposition J language,” the Civil Grand Jury noted. “Thus, the concept of regulating public officials’ relations with those who receive ‘public benefits’ from them (Proposition J’s intent) was totally eliminated from San Francisco law.”
The report also takes the Ethics Commission to task for being too lax when it comes to addressing potential conflicts of interest.
It goes so far as to recommend that the agency hand over control of its major enforcement investigations to the Fair Political Practices Commission, a state agency with a more robust team of investigators who might produce better results.
“The Ethics Commission lacks resources to handle major enforcement cases,” the Civil Grand Jury notes. “These include, for example, cases alleging misconduct, conflict of interest, violating campaign finance and lobbying laws, and violating post-employment restrictions.”
More information has been coming out about how Airbnb is used to convert San Francisco apartments into tourist rentals — including an interesting study reported by the San Francisco Chronicle last weekend — in advance of next month’s hearings on legislation to legalize and regulate short-term rentals.
But questions remain about why the city agencies in charge of regulating such “tourist conversions,” which have long been illegal under city law, have done so little to crack down on the growing practice. For more than two years, we at the Guardian have been publicly highlighting such violations, which have finally caught fire with the public in the last six months.
But attorney Joseph Tobener, who has represented clients evicted to facilitate Airbnb rentals and has brought a number of such lawsuits on behalf of San Francisco Tenants Union, still can’t get city departments to issue notices of violation even for the most egregious offenders that he’s suing, an administrative prerequisite to filing a lawsuit.
“The Department of Building Inspection and the Department of Planning need to start shutting these violators down by enforcing the existing laws, or we need stricter laws that allow us to pursue our claims without City approval. Two months ago, we sent our requests to pursue landlords on behalf of the SFTU. Then, radio silence. Two months of utter inaction. Someone in charge does not want to see us close the loophole that is allowing landlords to take units out of our housing stock,” Tobener said.
The Chronicle investigation found that in San Francisco, 1,278 Airbnb hosts in San Francisco were managing multiple properties (Chiu’s legislation would limit hosts to their primary residence for just 90 rental nights per year), including 160 entire homes that tourists appear to be renting out full-time. Overall, the paper counted 4,798 properties for rent in San Francisco through Airbnb, 2,984 of which were entire homes, belying the “shared housing” label favored by the company and its supporters.
And even though groups like the San Francisco Apartment Association and SFTU say they have been actively trying to get the city departments to crack down on such illegal uses over the last year, representatives for DBI and the Planning Department say they’ve received few complaints and therefore issued few violations, while also saying they need more resources to regulate the problem, something Chiu’s legislation would begin to help address.
“Our enforcement process is complaint based and we investigate each complaint that is received by our Department (more than 700 per year). Complaints regarding short term rentals that result in the loss of housing are prioritized for enforcement,” Planning Department spokesperson Gina Simi told the Guardian.
She said that property owners are given the opportunity to correct a violation before being cited, something that she said happens in about 80 percent of cases.
“A case is opened for every complaint received. Since March 2012, we have had approximately 120 enforcement cases for Short Term Rentals. In each case, notices were sent to the property owner and approximately half (54) have been abated and half (66) are active cases. Many of these (approximately 30) were received since the beginning of April 2014,” she told us when we inquired about the issue last month.
As for Tobener’s charge that city agencies are dragging their feet and making it difficult for his clients to pursue relief from the courts, she said, “The ability for interested parties to pursue the matter through civil action (for injunctive or monetary relief) following the filing of a complaint and determination of a violation is a process outlined in Chapter 41A, which is enforced by the Department of Building Inspection. Enforcement under the Planning Code does not allow for interested parties to seek civil action.”
But DBI spokesperson William Strawn said his department hasn’t received many complaints, claiming to have gotten just three total through the end of last year.
“A few weeks ago, per Mr. Tobener, we did receive seven complaints, with documentation, that the Housing Division is still reviewing; and, per [DBI Chief Housing Director Rosemary] Bosque, we also recently received an additional seven complaints – for a current total of 14 – that also are under review and being scheduled for administrative review hearings, as required by Chapter 41A,” Strawn told the Guardian.
But he also pointed his finger back at the Planning Department as the agency that should be handling problems related to the short-term stays facilitated by Airbnb.
“Given that these ‘duration of stay’ issues are Planning Code matters – a point we have made to Supervisor Chiu, and which I know you discussed with the Planning Director {John Rahaim] during Supervisor Chiu’s media availability on this issue a few weeks ago – the role of the Building Department in the enforcement of these types of complaints in our relatively new Internet Age will require guidance from the City Attorney,” Strawn told us.
Indeed, in response to a Guardian question about why the Planning Department seems to have ignored violations facilitated by Airbnb, Rahaim said that his department hasn’t had the resources, tools, and authority to address the problem, even though, “This is an important issue we’ve been hearing about for quite some time.”
Programmers-in-training line the work tables at HackReactor, a software engineering boot camp many in the tech community call a “university disruptor” due to its speed in training coders. Those hunched over computers are typing their way toward a goal: joining the ranks of the 12-week course’s alumni, now employed at tech companies like Adobe, Beats Audio, Pandora, and Hipmunk. But walk past the rows of intensely driven (yet casually dressed) engineers and you’ll also encounter the program’s unlikely new trainees: San Francisco high school students.
Tech company HackReactor and nonprofit Mission Bit are co-training San Francisco Unified School District students for the summer, and throwing them into the trenches with pre-professional engineers.
Soon, these students will be proficient coder kids.
“Mission Bit gave us our first understanding of what javascript was,” Gisela, a 17-year-old Lowell High School student told us. “Hack Reactor said ‘now make a game,’ and threw me into the code.”
The free program is a new extension of Mission Bit’s after-school coding classes, offered this year at Mission High School, a SFUSD public school, and Lick Wilmerding High School, which is private. The semester program is paid for by tech companies: mainly WeChat (Tencent America), with in-kind sponsors including Salesforce, HackReactor, DeNA, Brightroll, AdRoll, Rackspace, co.lab, and Tagged. The summer program is fully paid for by HackReactor.
It also comes at a crossroads for San Francisco: Its communities of color are being priced out just as its tech industry is searching for ways to enroll more diverse workers.
Though many pin the displacement problem on the rising cost of housing, there’s also another less-spoken-of culprit: Local tech companies draw many applicants from around the world to fill jobs instead of hiring local residents.
This may be due in part to lack of trained prospective employees locally.
There’s a broken education pipeline between local schools and the tech sector, both sides admit. The new effort by Mission Bit and HackReactor may be a first step towards plugging the leak. If the program is successful, subsequent iterations may establish the first stable pathway to technology sector jobs for San Francisco students.
Though the intern program is still in its beta phase, it shows much promise, and comes at a dire time for the city.
PROBLEMS CONVERGE
The summer coding program may hold solutions for three problems that coexist simultaneously: displacement of communities of color, the tech sector’s shocking lack of diversity, and the SFUSD training gap.
The city’s Mission District, often pointed to as tech workers’ most desired neighborhood, saw 1,400 Latinos leave between 1990 and 2011, while its white population grew by over 2,900, according to a recent study by Causa Justa, Just Cause.
The tech industry has a complementary problem: Google recently revealed its employees are 70 percent men and 61 percent white. Just five percent of Google’s workforce is black or Hispanic. Though the Asian population is 30 percent of its workforce, that’s still out of line with the significant Asian presence in the Bay Area.
Sources tell us Google puts heavy effort into diversity recruitment and likely had better percentages than the rest of the industry. Google claimed in myriad news reports that potential employees of color were difficult to find.
But SFUSD’s 52,000 students are 25 percent Latino, 41 percent Asian and 10 percent African American, so why not recruit students from our diverse local public schools, bolstering San Francisco’s flailing middle class at the same time?
That brings us to our last problem. Until recently, the SFUSD only taught computer science in three of its 17 high schools: Balboa, Galileo, and Lowell. There’s a tech training gap in San Francisco, making the leap for SFUSD students to the tech sector all the less likely.
The SFUSD is now taking steps to rectify this, but the change will take time.
“SFUSD sees teaching coding, digital literacy and computer science as critical to preparing our students for success,” SFUSD spokesperson Gentle Blythe told the Guardian. “We have a long-term plan in place for how we are phasing in teaching computer science, including coding, throughout a student’s K-12 career.”
SFUSD launched computer science courses in two additional schools last year: Wallenberg and Washington. More are on the way, Blythe said. Other schools host coding tutoring programs. One organization, Code.org, led a “day of code” where thousands of SFUSD students to tried a hand at rudimentary programming exercises.
But in order to really tackle the gap, SFUSD teachers and students will need hands-on training with coders and software engineers. That’s where Mission Bit and HackReactor come in.
STARTING SMALL
Tyson Daugherty founded Mission Bit after a startling realization: San Francisco schools weren’t prepared to teach his children how to enter the tech industry.
Daugherty was on the business side of tech, starting his first company in 1999. After moving to the city he wanted schools where his children, ages 5 and 2, could one day train to join his industry.
“I became incredibly frustrated with what I was finding in public schools,” he said, sitting with us in HackReactor’s Market Street office. “These kids are learning fundamental material in science and math, but there’s a disconnection to application and purpose.”
Mission Bit was born, with a simple objective of increasing coding education in local schools.
Gisela’s Lowell High School classes were rigorous, she said, but while programming her first game she relearned physics all over again.
“I’m making a game where each player has a ball, they bounce against each other to bounce the player into the hole,” she told us. Her technical mentor, Kwyn Alice Meagher, gave her a physics crash course to get the ball to bounce just right.
“[In school] I learned the logic of physics but not the application,” Gisela said. “Now that I understand the purpose of learning it, I’m figuring it all out.”
The students start at Mission Bit learning HTML, Javascript, CSS3, Ruby, SQL and Sinatra, with instruction provided by volunteers from local technology companies. Daugherty told us over 60 volunteers emailed Mission Bit after they reached out for potential teachers, and the nonprofit could only utilize 30. Those additional volunteers will get a chance to teach students in the upcoming fall after school program.
Once students “graduate” Mission Bit it’s time to join the workforce. Gisela and two other students jumped to an internship at HackReactor, where they’re putting their coding knowledge to practical use.
Isaac Zimmern, a graduating Lowell senior, is one of those other students. He celebrated working side by side with mentors while he programmed, inspiring him to pursue computer science in college.
And though Gisela and Zimmern are both from Lowell, many schools were represented in Mission Bit’s program. In one office a group of about a dozen students sat at computers, programming Android phones to play a simple game resembling “Doodle Jump.”
They hailed from a myriad of schools: Raoul Wallenberg, Balboa, Lowell and more. Douglas Mejia, 18, let us see his “Doodle Jump” clone. Its theme music popped on loud, singing “I ain’t sayin’ she’s a gold digger, but she ain’t messin’ with a broke — — -,” and on-screen Kanye West hopped from platform to platform.
Mejia smiled proudly as he showed us his game. He said he wasn’t interested in making games while in school, but Mission Bit turned him into a believer. Now he’ll study computer science at the University of San Francisco.
Mission Bit’s class body is 8 percent African American, 24 percent Latino, and over 50 percent Asian, according to the company’s internal data (that’s in line with SFUSD’s own demographics). Nearly half of the students come from the south side of San Francisco, around the Ingleside District.
The program is still small, but Daugherty says it’s designed with scalability in mind. There’s potential for these students to one day not only fill tech’s diversity gap, but to allow tech jobs to be filled by San Franciscans, born and raised.
But Daugherty says such goals are secondary. The focus is on the students.
“The industry has a very specific agenda about where they want their engineers diversified,” he said. “If this is where our students want to go, we’ll support them. But there are other paths to take.”
Students can use their programming skills in many jobs and industries, he said, not just tech.
Still, the students will have an opportunity to visit local tech companies Square, AirBnb and others, meeting engineers who one day may be peers. Daugherty calls these people “touch points,” making social contacts for mentorships and job seeking that blue-collar SFUSD students may not have themselves.
Ultimately, the program “lets you get programming skills without going through the money filtering step of a university,” said Anthony Phillips, CEO of Hack Reactor. Counter to the belief in pure meritocracy many in tech swear to, Phillips acknowledged he had help: his brother, a Twitter employee. When Phillips first learned code and started to fumble, his brother told him “you’re so smart, but so dumb. Just keep doing it.”
So Phillips aims to do the same for the students at HackReactor. He’s like a coach in the corner for new boxers taking their aim at advanced coding skills.
“Not everyone has someone there that can say, ‘just keep doing it,'” Phillips said.
Politics is dirty business, and I should never underestimate the willingness of politicians to turn any editorial praise they receive into an electoral advantage, distorting the context as needed, a lesson that I was reminded of this week.
Several Guardian readers have called me this week to complain about a mailer dropped on voters by the David Chiu for Assembly campaign, which includes long quotes from Chiu’s endorsements by the San Francisco Chronicle and Bay Area Reporter, as well as positive quotes from the Bay Guardian and San Francisco Examiner.
Although neither the Guardian nor the Examiner has endorsed Chiu — we enthusiastically endorsed David Campos in that race, while the Examiner is waiting until the fall rematch to do endorsements — our readers said the flyer left the impression that we had.
Chiu campaign spokesperson Nicole Derse disputes that view. “It definitely did not leave that impression,” she told me. “We were very clear about who has endorsed.” She said the Examiner and Guardian were included because “it’s important to highlight objective sources like newspapers.”
The Guardian quote was from a July 23, 2013 blog post in which I indeed wrote, “It is Chiu and his bustling office of top aides that have done most of the heavy legislation lifting this year, finding compromise solutions to some of the most vexing issues facing the city.”
It was certainly true at the time, although I received a lot criticism for what I wrote from the progressive community, which pointed out how Chiu had maneuvered himself into the swing vote position on key issues such as condo conversions and CEQA reform. And the compromises Chiu forged actually allowed fiscal conservatives to erode San Francisco’s standing as a progessive city while burgeoning his own political resume.
So I ran another blog post to air those concerns, and then we ran a hybrid of the two in the next week’s paper that closes with this line, “In the end, Chiu can be seen as an effective legislator, a centrist compromiser, or both. Perspective is everything in politics.” BTW, in that original post, I also noted that the Airbnb legislation Chiu was working on should challenge his political skills and reputation, and indeed it took many more months to introduce and has been met by a storm of criticism, becoming the marquee political fight of the summer at City Hall.
After that first post, I also heard from Campos and his supporters predicting that the Chiu campaign would use my well-meaning praise to convey support from the Guardian in a misleading way, a prophecy that has now proven prescient.
But I also think that Campos has done a good job at undermining Chiu’s greatest strength in this election, that of being an effective legislator, by hammering on the reality that things have gotten worse for the average San Francisco because Chiu and his allies have been most effective on behalf of the tech companies, landlords, and other rich and powerful interests that are undermining the city’s diversity, affordability, and progressive values.
“Effective for whom? That’s what’s important,” Campos told us during his endorsement interview, noting that, “Most people in San Francisco have been left behind and out of that prosperity.”
Chiu’s campaign counters by overtly and in whisper campaigns saying that progressives can’t be effective in Sacramento, blatantly overlooking the fact that the incumbent he’s running to replace, Tom Ammiano, has been both a consistent, trustworthy progressive, and an effective legislator who has gotten more bills signed than most of his colleagues, even as he takes on tough issues like reforms to Prop. 13 and prison conditions.
And Ammiano hasn’t just said good things about David Campos, his chosen successor — Ammiano has actually endorsed Campos.
While everyone is out partying it up on the long three-day weekend, the dedicated staff here at the Bay Guardian will still take a break from the mayhem to bring you two hours of local music and lively, information talk during our bi-weekly Alternative Ink radio show from 6-8pm Sunday, May 25, on BFF.fm. UPDATE: Listen to the show here.
This week will be our special Holiday Party Edition, with the latest news from the recreational and dance-floor front lines, perhaps with a bit more slurring and profanity than usual — and if you’ve listened to us before, you know that’s really saying something.
Art Director Brooke Ginnard will be laying down the tracks and checking our levels, so to speak, while Editor-in-Chief Steven T. Jones, News Editor Rebecca Bowe, and Staff Writer Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez provide the inside scoops and witty banter.
As I covered the last week’s Share conference for this week’s Guardian, I finally got the chance to poke around the 888 Brannan Street headquarters of Airbnb, the company I’ve been doggedly reporting on and getting stonewalled by over the last year or so. Alas, CEO Brian Chesky and other Airbnb bigwigs were nowhere to be found at this opening reception for the Share conference, but I did do a few other illuminating interviews.
It’s a big, wide open space dotted with weird little nooks designed to look like homes, connoting the company’s shared housing business model. Attendees noshed on rack of lamb and other gourmet yummies served from the company’s top floor cafeteria overlooking SoMa and the freeway. Several Airbnb employees took plates of food back to their workstations in the open office area with an iMac on every desk.
Over dinner, I chatted up Whitney Vosburgh and Jeff Nelder from Brand New Purposes, a Berkeley business that “builds brand communities,” they say. I was interested to hear what they thought of industry’s branding of the whole “sharing economy” concept, but they don’t really see it as a brand.
“I think the sharing economy is a movement,” Nelder said, using a label that would be repeated many times at the conference by its most fervent proponents.
But c’mon, I said, isn’t this also a concept that these companies have been working diligently to brand into the public consciousness, particularly among political leaders, often as a way to disguise the fact that renting isn’t really sharing?
Actually, Vosburgh said, this movement is tapping into something essential that humans need and aren’t getting these days. The idea of sharing is about building connections to one another at a time when social isolation is growing despite our online connections.
“The greatest threat to civilization is social death,” Vosburgh said. “There’s an old-fashioned longing for connection.”
That’s true, but is the commodifying of that need a healthy thing for society? I told them about my concerns that the hype and business models don’t seem to really match the values that are being espoused. But they seemed enamored of the concept and speaking mostly in its buzzwords.
“There’s the buzz and then there’s the reality,” Vosburgh said. “But if it’s not real, there’s no deal.”
Hmm. I decided to move on, and I soon found myself chatting with Lena White, an Airbnb host from Southern California who did seem real, talking positively about how Airbnb became her new profession, but also expressing concerns about its bottom line behaviors.
“I got a personal invitation from Airbnb and I wanted to see this,” White said of the conference and the company’s posh headquarters, adding that the company invited her because “I make them a lot of money.”
And she makes quite a bit of money herself, now that she hosts hundreds of Airbnb visitors a year in two properties that she owns and two that she rents, enough money to quit her job as a high school teacher in Santa Monica.
While she was still teaching, she would spend her summers off traveling and visiting family from her native Russia, “so our beautiful property on Venice Beach was open the whole summer,” and she began to rent it out through Airbnb. “Even when I rent it for really low, I make more than I made as a teacher.”
So she became a full-time Airbnb host. “We wanted to extend it and make some real income,” she told us. “But there were so many questions. We wanted to come up here to get answers.”
She has questions about taxes and local regulations in the three Southern California cities where she has properties (Venice Beach, Marina del Rey, and Palm Springs). “Me, as a host, I would love to be legal,” she said. “I would rather pay that 14 percent [transient occupancy tax] and be in the system. These properties that I rent, even with that 14 percent, I’ll be fine.”
Her main frustrations aren’t with her local officials, but with Airbnb, which she criticizes for failing to offer guidance or mechanisms for legalizing her hosting activities while at the same time marketing her property in deceptive ways that can cause a backlash from her guests.
For example, she said that Airbnb insisted on sending a professional photographer out to shoot her properties, over her objections, and then had a graphic designer redo her profiles to make them more attractive to guests.
“I couldn’t recognize my own property. The bedroom looks ten times bigger than it is,” White told us, noting that some of her guests have felt tricked. “It puts us in a position where is seems like we’re lying. But we’re not lying.”
She is also critical of the Airbnb website for marketing properties as if they are hotel rooms, without being honest that the guests will be sharing someone’s living space.
“Nowhere on their site does it say ‘sharing economy,’ that you’re going into someone’s home,” White said, acknowledging that the company needs to expand its customer base to make itself attractive to investors. “I know they need to sell us to make money.”
But she said that Wall Street’s values are squeezing out those of the sharing economy.
“That’s what scares me and I don’t want it to go that way,” White said, saying that she has sent the company messages complaining about how it markets itself and properties such as hers, but it’s fallen on deaf ears. “I don’t like it, it’s like a hotel and it takes something out of it. I don’t want to be part of a big corporation.”
At the very least, she thinks that Airbnb needs to come clean in the communities where it operates and to start helping its hosts more. BTW, Airbnb once again refused to respond to my request for comment for this post or my article in this week’s paper.
“They’re using all the best brains and minds to sell us, but they don’t tell us what to do,” White said, saying that she’s found kinship with other hosts at the conference, but not answers from the company. “Nobody knows what to do. But I’m learning it’s not my personal problem, lots of people have it.”
Documents obtained by the Bay Guardian show the active role that Airbnb played in helping craft the legislation by David Chiu that would regulate and legalize the company’s activities in San Francisco.
Emails we received through a Sunshine Ordinance request show that Chiu staffers and politically connected lobbyist David Owen, working for Airbnb, worked closely to craft the legislation. The emails, mostly from January 2013, detail conversations between Chiu’s staffer Amy Chan and Owen on how best to craft proposed regulations of “shared” housing spaces.
“Hi David, Take a look and see if this is useful,” begins a Jan. 30, 2013 message from Chan. “I included all the big picture policies and I left out some of the legalese. I’ll call (Deputy City Attorney) Marlena (Byrne) first thing in the morning if I don’t see a draft from her later tonight. And let’s definitely check in tomorrow.”
Whether or not that level of cooperation is acceptable depends where you stand: housing activists who see Chiu’s legislation as weak would no doubt cry foul, but sharing economy advocates may appreciate Chiu reaching out to the company on important legislation.
San Francisco Tenants Union Executive Director Ted Gullicksen was also copied on some of the emails and gave input, but Gullicksen didn’t seem to actually help write the legislation, only offering a few suggestions on proposed language.
Owen’s emails went further. “A slightly more cleaned up, consistent version. Please disregard previous,” Owen wrote to Chan and Byrne on Jan. 28. The title of the attached document was “AdmincodeBJcomments1-28revised,” and contained a draft of Chiu’s legislation with recent edits and revisions which were revealed using the Microsoft Word “track changes” function.
Was it unusual or inappropriate for Airbnb to play such an active role writing the legislation? “Is it common practice for stakeholders to give us feedback directly? Yes,” Chan told us. “We’ve had a number of stakeholders give us feedback.”
She referenced Gullicksen’s emails, and said she also sought input from other stakeholders such as unions and the Hotel Council. But Owen, who was a legislative aide to Chiu’s predecessor, Aaron Peskin, was the only one to make in-document changes and send them back to Chiu’s office.
Chan defended this by pointing out that other groups provided some language suggestions, but admitted that they did not write it directly in the legislation itself, nor was the feedback as extensive and detailed. Among Owen’s edits were small word-choice changes, from “unit” to “hosting platform,” from “will comply” to “is in full compliance,” from “for rent” to “rented.”
Seemingly minor changes were numerous, but other changes were more extensive, although not all were accepted. Owen emailed Chiu with a list of new proposed changes, including changing the number allowable rental days from 90 to 120, “understanding we’re not in full agreement here.” The final legislation kept it at 90 days.
“From the big picture perspective to say we’re only taking direct feedback from one group versus other groups is incorrect,” Chan said. “The direction comes from us, and we make the decision after all.”
Last week’s two-day Share conference in San Francisco came at an auspicious moment for companies that define themselves as part of the new “sharing economy,” which ranges from peer-to-peer services and products brokered online to various cooperative ventures designed to minimize resource consumption.
Most of these growing companies are part of San Francisco’s technology industry, using web-based interfaces to conduct their economic transactions. And some have been making local enemies and headlines recently by disrupting key aspects of urban life, from Airbnb impacting the housing and hotel markets to Lyft and Uber upending the taxi industry.
In fact, the biggest battle brewing at City Hall these days is over widely watched legislation by Board of Supervisors President David Chiu to regulate and legalize the short-term rentals facilitated by Airbnb and similar companies. And state agencies based in San Francisco are now working on regulations that would affect Lyft and its ilk.
So we decided to listen in as disciples of the sharing economy talked among themselves about the challenges and opportunities facing what they call the “new economy,” one that is at an important crossroads that will determine whether the interests of communities or capital guide its evolution.
CHIU DECLARES WAR
When Chiu took the stage at the Share conference, he was joining a sharing economy community that, he said he would probably be a part of today if he hadn’t gone into public service, citing his own experience with tech startups before running for supervisor.
“I believe we are becoming the capital of the sharing economy,” Chiu said, citing examples of San Francisco’s “ethos of sharing” that include the Summer of Love, Burning Man, and the fact that “we are a community that wants to foster trust among strangers to build what I think is one of the most amazing cities in the entire world. But we’re also a city that is expensive. The rent is too damn high.”
Chiu spoke proudly of San Francisco’s environmentalism and his own legislative contributions to that legacy. And he said “we are a city of innovation,” lauding the technology industry. “We understand that keeping up with the Joneses may not be the way to go,” he said. “In fact, sharing with the Joneses, I think, is the better path.”
In Chiu’s formulation, the sharing economy is the synthesis of all of these values and goals. By using computers and smartphones to facilitate the sharing of goods and services, we use less stuff and consume fewer resources, in the process opening up economic opportunities for more people.
He sounded like the most enthusiastic of sharing economy true believers, but with a couple of caveats, acknowledging how those “pesky taxes” on most of these economic transactions go unpaid, and how Airbnb and similar companies have removed apartments from the housing market for local residents.
“Shareable housing has both helped and exacerbated our housing crisis,” Chiu said, describing how he spent more than a year working on legislation that would regulate and legalize short-term housing rentals in San Francisco, where they are now considered illegal “hotel conversions” (see “Into thin air,” 8/6/13, and dozens of other Guardian stories and blog posts on the issue).
Chiu’s legislation would require Airbnb hosts to register with the city, rent out only their primary residence, and occupy that space for at least 275 days per year (which Chiu has said limits Airbnb hosts to just 90 rental nights per year, although critics dispute that interpretation).
“I thought this was a reasonable solution, but two weeks later there was a major press conference attacking it,” Chiu told Share attendees, referring to the coalition of landlord, neighborhood, labor, and affordable housing groups that have come out against the legislation, calling it a blanket rezoning of residential property around the city, pledging an initiative campaign challenging it.
“In part, this is politics. I’m in the midst of a race for the state Assembly this year, my opponent has supporters who have been protesting the Twitter headquarters, throwing rocks at Google commuter shuttles, vomiting on Yahoo buses, referring to tech workers as not real San Franciscans,” Chiu said.
Then Chiu ramped up his rhetoric, equating progressive concerns about the tax breaks and special treatment that Chiu, Mayor Ed Lee, and others have extended to tech companies in San Francisco with a war on the sharing economy and the forced deportation of its workers.
“They are calling for war on you, even though they don’t realize that what you are doing is helping to make sure we’re addressing our income inequality, we’re empowering everyday people by building community and using technology,” Chiu said. “All of you need to get involved in the political debate. You’re busy trying to change the world, but status quo interests are actively trying to ship you to Menlo Park, Oakland, and San Jose.”
In the end, Chiu did urge those starting up companies to “think early about how your paradigm meshes with existing laws and regulations,” but that tepid call for civic responsibility and good corporate citizenship did little to dull his feeding of techie exceptionalism, fearmongering, or appeals to vaguely libertarian values.
AIRBNB’S BOOSTERS
The pep rally atmosphere of the session got pumped up even more by Airbnb’s Douglas Atkin and venture capitalist Ron Conway, both of whom had nothing but glowing praise for the burgeoning industry and its customers, offering none of the caveats put forth by Chiu or the speaker who followed him, White House staffer Greg Nelson, who talked about the challenging access, equity, and regulatory issues facing the industry.
“We at Airbnb and PEERS think the sharing economy is a jolly good thing,” Atkin said in a charming British accent, presenting the sharing economy as an unstoppable and uniformly positive force that is replacing “the old economy, the last economy.”
As an advertising executive in that old economy, “I was the devil,” Atkin said. Now playing the role of savior, he spoke with an evangelical flair as he flashed Airbnb slides and videos, telling the crowd “there’s been a decentralization of wealth, control, and power” because “you can’t do this new economy without creating community.”
It was easy to forget that Atkin represents a company that Wall Street analysts have valued at $10 billion, despite having a business model that is illegal in many cities, causing some hosts to be evicted and others to evict their tenants, while the company and its investors move quickly to cash out with an initial public stock offering.
Among those who would profit handsomely from that IPO is Conway, a billionaire who already got far richer late last year from being “an early investor in Twitter,” as he described himself to the crowd after being introduced as someone who “has really led the way of connecting the tech industry to the public sector.”
Indeed, Conway spoke proudly of funding the politicians who pushed the package of tax breaks for Twitter and other technology companies that followed it into the mid-Market area, most notably Mayor Ed Lee, the biggest beneficiary of Conway’s largesse among San Francisco politicians.
Conway speaks the language of the technology sector that he’s been sponsoring with angel investments since the early days of the last technology boom, making seemingly common sense appeals that hide his conservative ideology, just as he switched his political party registration from Republican to decline-to-state when he became active in San Francisco politics (see “The Plutocrat,” 11/27/12).
But for the careful listener familiar with San Francisco political history, there were some intriguing revelations in his address that were probably lost on the average techie in attendance that morning.
For example, Conway talked about his role following up his advocacy for the Twitter tax break with behind-the-scenes work helping to craft the business tax reform measure in 2012 — which the Controller’s Office analysis found just happened to give the technology companies that Conway was invested in a substantial tax cut.
“Now all the companies enjoy this,” Conway said in reference to Twitter’s tax break, “because Prop. B was passed a year and half ago.”
He also then admitted that Airbnb owes its phenomenal growth to the widespread economic desperation triggered by the financial collapse of 2008 and an economic recovery that still hasn’t reached the average citizen struggling to cover their housing costs.
“Airbnb, for example, would not be here today if there wasn’t an economic crisis and a recession in 2008 in New York, where people had to decide to rent out a room in their house or I get foreclosed on my mortgage. It was that basic. Airbnb wouldn’t be here today if people all over New York didn’t save their mortgages and start using this product. And then by word of mouth it spread around the world because it is so convenient and so practical,” Conway said.
Conway is conservative on financial issues, but more moderate on social issues, and he talked about his advocacy work on gun control and immigration reform. Yet even on those issues, where it is almost exclusively Republicans who are blocking the changes Conway says he wants, he turns the gridlock into an anti-government argument.
“We need term limits in Congress,” the former Republican said, citing a standard conservative trope that got a big applause from the Share conference crowd.
Finally, he elevated the current struggles in San Francisco over the sharing economy into key battles that will shape the future of the new economy.
“This [Airbnb] legislation that David Chiu has proposed, which in the next few months will go to the Board of Supervisors is crucial legislation the whole country will watch,” Conway said, calling for everyone in the crowd to get involved and lobby their supervisors. “David Chiu needs help. This would not pass if it went to a vote today, it wouldn’t come close to passing. So we have to change this. We want to do on the local level what we have to do on the national level: Organize and conquer!”
ACCESS AND EQUITY
After Conway came an intriguing panel discussion about equity and environmental issues with Nikki Silvestri of Green for All, Vien Truong with the Greenlining Institute, and Adam Werbach, the former Sierra Club executive director who started the stuff-sharing company Yertle.
It was moderated by GreenBiz.com editor Joel Makower, who cited information from the previous day’s sessions about how it’s mostly middle class white people who use the sharing economy. “The reality is it’s not that inclusive,” he said, and all his guests agreed and talked about the need to broaden its benefits.
“How do you marry the economy with people?” Truong said as she discussed that challenge. And it’s an urgent need, as Werbach said while answering a question about how the sharing economy could help bring about a new kind of environmentalism aimed at producing and consuming less stuff.
“What’s wrong with the old environmentalism is we’re not achieving our mission. Climate change is what’s wrong with the old environmentalism,” he said.
Werbach cited the goal of replacing about a quarter of the things we now buy with shared goods, even though Amazon and other companies have made it easier than ever to have new products shipped around the world: “It is cheaper, faster, and easier to get something new than to get something used from right next door.”
But Silvestri said the limited participation in the sharing economy makes it difficult to see it as the solution yet, calling for the sharing economy to address access and equity issues, something that marginalized groups would respond to if it was based on true values of sharing.
“Coming from my own background, African Americans had to share because white people wasn’t giving us nothing,” she said. By that same measure, she also said that low-income people feel wary of being taken advantage of by sharing companies and customers: “When you’re in survival mode, you’re wary of people taking from you.”
That’s one reason why Silvestri said that black communities are slower to adopt sharing with strangers, whether it be their homes or cars, something that could be overcome with more personalized outreach: “If I look you in the eye, you might not come take my shit.”
She said that for all the talk at the conference about “community,” the community of strangers that makes up the sharing economy isn’t a true community, something that needs to change to realize the lofty goals that many espouse.
“The sharing economy is new enough that if we figure out this problem early then all of us can actually participate,” Silvestri said.
Werbach agreed, saying the sharing economy has great potential, but only if it makes the right moves now. “This is the beginning of a movement, but the people aren’t here yet,” he said. “We’re at the very beginning of this story.”
He defines the struggle of the moment as one between human and economic values, hoping the sharing economy’s customers will determine its values: “There is an interesting wild west movement now. We need people to do the recruiting so Wall Street doesn’t do the recruiting.”
STRAIGHT TALK
The closing plenary session at Share illustrated the divergent attitudes and goals that mark the sharing economy, in which some members feel a collective responsibility to meet important societal goals, while others seem more interested in just making money and mouthing the rhetoric of sharing.
New York University economics professor Arun Sandararajan, who runs the Collaborative Economy Project that studies and promotes the sharing economy, said it has the potential to develop in ways that will either exacerbate or reduce the income inequality that has become such a growing public policy concern.
Sandararajan expressed hopes that the sharing economy could increase the economic growth rate and lower the wealth gap by broadening access to capital and opportunities for entrepreneurship. But he also argued that the sharing economy has the potential to change the terms of the debate by giving more people access to goods and services than their incomes might otherwise allow.
“We have to go beyond measuring inequality in terms of income and wealth,” he said, offering a conception likely to appeal to the wealthy, but probably not those struggling to get by, even if they were able to get more hand-me-downs through Yerdle or odd jobs through TaskRabbit.
Others on the panel illustrated the dichotomy between do-gooders and profit-seekers more clearly, showing how broadly those in the sharing economy are trying to define it these days.
Jose Quinonez runs the nonprofit Mission Asset Fund, a nonprofit on Valencia Street that assists with peer-to-peer microlending, an amazing program that seemed to have little in common with the investor-backed companies that dominated the agenda. “I didn’t know I was part of the sharing economy until today,” he told the crowd.
In an earlier session, Quinonez called out the self-congratulatory tone by some boosters. “As we talk about the word inclusive it’s very easy to forget the people not invited to the party…We have to make sure we’re not making an exclusive sharing economy.”
Next came Denise Cheng, an academic who has been studying the sharing economy for the MIT Center for Civic Media, and she had perhaps the most poignant and insightful answer to the question the conference posed about what will best catalyze the sharing economy.
“Straight talk will catalyze the sharing economy,” Cheng said.
She discussed how the broad label of the sharing economy gets claimed by everyone from small idealists who truly want to promote the idea of sharing to self-interested corporations who use the label for political cover and really mean “renting.”
“When we say sharing economy, we actually mean a lot of things,” she said. “Companies that adopt the sharing economy label are not necessarily adopting the values of the sharing economy.”
Compounding that deception is the fact that companies like Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb are profiting from business models that are often illegal on the local level, but doing little to help drivers or hosts who get in trouble with local authorities: “When someone has to answer on the local level, it’s the providers who are on the front line.”
There was a very different tone and message that came from the subsequent guests to join the panel, who shamelessly promoted their companies and didn’t seem to take heed of Cheng’s call for straight talk.
“Sharing cars is how we can catalyze the sharing economy,” Jessica Scorpio, wearing a T-shirt of the car-sharing company she helped found, Getaround. She called car-sharing “a gateway drug to the sharing economy,” noting that car-sharing customers often go on to use other sharing economy products and services.
“Sharing cars is transforming the fundamentals of our transportation system,” Scorpio said, claiming that each shared car takes up to 32 cars off the road, a figure that doesn’t square with the body of peer-reviewed research on the subject, which places the actual number at nine to 13 cars.
Hyperbole and exaggeration are common among the biggest boosters of sharing economy companies, as are the sins of omission and misdirection — all of which are perhaps what prompted Chang’s “straight talk” prescription.
Sunil Paul, co-founder and CEO of the ridesharing company Sidecar, gave a long and detailed presentation on the supposedly ambiguous definition of “commercial transactions,” calling for what he called a “safe harbor” for sharing activities, without once mentioning the word that he was actually talking about and dancing around: taxes.
“There are certain activities that should be beyond the commercial reach of government,” Paul said, describing his clients who drive customers around the city like taxi drivers less than full time. “We need a safe harbor for sharing that protects these activities from being considered commercial.”
Paul said that Sidecar and other sharing economy companies have “blurred the line between what is personal and what is commercial,” comparing the activities his company facilitates to carpooling and arguing that people should be able to cover the annual cost of driving, say around $10,000, without it being considered a commercial activity (i.e. a taxable transaction).
“As long as you don’t make a profit from it, it’s not a commercial transaction,” Paul said, redefining the very concept of commercial.
And remember, this is a company that is already having a profound impact on the regulated taxi industry — of which Sandararajan said, “I think the taxi service as we know it will largely cease to exist in a few years” — just as other sharing economy companies steal market share from other industries, as Airbnb is doing to the hotel industry, also while avoiding taxes on those transactions.
FROM TALK TO ACTION
“One of the things we like to do in the sharing economy is talk about the sharing economy — a lot!” Jesse Biroscak, an Airbnb host and founder of BayShare, said during a session at Share entitled “Shareable Cities: From Concept to Action.”
It was the first thing I heard upon arriving at the conference, but I already knew it was true after covering this movement over the last couple years, a point that was emphasized strongly by the excited evangelism that I heard again and again over the next 24 hours.
But for all the talk that those in the so-called sharing economy do about the sharing economy, there is often a deliberate vagueness to it that tries to mask its many contradictions and paradoxes.
Its biggest proponents are anxious to go big — defined by a strange mix of idealism (for environmentalism, libertarianism, economic and social equity, and an odd and often contradictory assortment of other goals) and the desire to cash in on the new gold rush — before the opportunities slip away (thanks to competitors, government regulators, or an economic downturn).
“I’m tired of talking about it, I want to do things,” said Biroscak, a regular Airbnb host from San Francisco, without ever really defining the things he wants to do.
BayShare also seems to have a vagueness of purpose, defining itself on its slick website as “an organization whose mission is to make the Bay Area the best place on the planet for sharing. As this movement grows, BayShare will explore how city stakeholders and the sharing community can work together to help the Sharing Economy flourish in the Bay Area to benefit the city, businesses, and communities. The organization looks to be a resource for the Mayor’s Working Group on the Sharing Economy.”
But that working group, which Mayor Ed Lee announced when Treasurer Jose Cisneros was holding hearings two years ago to determine whether Airbnb and other companies should pay the city’s transient occupancy tax, never actually convened. It was simply a stall tactic that evaporated after Cisneros ruled that the tax was indeed owed.
Still, BayShare lists many of the biggest sharing economy companies among its “members,” including Airbnb, RelayRides, Lyft, Yerdle, Vayable, City Car Share, Suppershare, and Get My Boat. Biroscak described the advocacy work that he and BayShare do, work that he urged all of the attendees to get involved with, so that public agencies understand and support this growing economic sector.
“This is called lobbying, and that’s okay. Lobbying is not a dirty word,” Biroscak told the crowd.
Lobbying may not be a dirty word, but it is a regulated activity in San Francisco and other cities, and neither Biroscak nor BayShare are registered lobbyists with the San Francisco Ethics Commission, which they should be if they are indeed lobbying.
Biroscak even boasted of a partnership with the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management that BayShare secured last year on behalf of its member companies to provide their services to local residents in the event of an emergency.
“The sharing economy was born here, and partnering with BayShare, we are committed to ensuring that San Francisco supports this emerging sector’s success and nurturing even greater civic involvement,” Mayor Ed Lee said last June in a press release announcing the partnership, while Chiu said, “I’m confident that BayShare will improve the communication between this emerging sector and local government as ‘collaborative consumption’ evolves and grows in San Francisco.”
But when we reached Biroscak by phone, he said that BayShare doesn’t really have any agreements with the city, and that it doesn’t actually represent its “member” companies or get any money from them. And he said BayShare “definitely does not consider itself a lobbying organization,” instead defining it more vaguely as “a convener and facilitator.”
But as a self-styled spokesperson for the movement — “I try to speak for the San Francisco sharing economy as an industry,” he said at the conference — Biroscak issued a call to action to a crowd that mostly seemed to be puttering on their electronic devices and only half paying attention: “We need to stand up for what we want, but we want to do it in a coordinated way.”
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez contributed to this report.